tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902Sat, 14 Oct 2017 10:09:21 +0000booksmusictheaterhistorypaintingShakespearepoetrywalkingartoperapoliticscommunityHow I wrote certain of my musiccommonplacelanguageeatingDuchampcriticismmozartMilhaudOregon Shakespeare FestivalmortalityphilosophyItalyRomeSteindancelandscapereading notessculptureChekhovJohn CageJudtPongeRoad tripStockhausendeatheconomymoviesnew musicscoresound fileAnouilhIvesKPFAMerce CunninghamModernismMolièreStoppardcommercedaily lifefadoflarfgraphic musichotelinfluenceironymemoirmomonorderphotographysongwarAnimal rightsBarnesBelliniBerkeleyBoulezBrahmsBrubeckCalderCaliforniaCarl RakosiConceptual artCoplandFeminismFranceIbsenJanáčekLiberal ArtsMills CollegeNanaoNatureNetherlandsNew CategoryOuLiPoPauline OliverosPicassoPortugalRacineSearch for MeaningStevensStravinskyThe Nation (magazine)agriculturebirdsbooks history musicbooks regionalism politicsdrawingdrinkfilmhaikujazzlistsmatissemeaningmusic Ives politicsmusic books historyphotography poetryphysicsprintmakingrecursionreposesoundspecializationstyletechnologytranslationtraveltravel landscapevideowineThe Eastside Viewtravel, eating, reading,
theater, music; occasional political remarkshttp://cshere.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)Blogger733125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-128264578157711169Fri, 06 Oct 2017 05:48:00 +00002017-10-05T23:00:13.229-07:00Tradition and the avant garde, as seen in 1968<div align="right"><em>Eastside Road, October 5, 2017—</em></div><big>j</big><small>UST FOR FUN</small>, and because I've just run across it, a transcription made by I know not who of remarks ad-libbed on <em>Critic's Circle</em>, a review show on the arts I used to participate in at KQED, back when this sort of thing was possible. <br />It's long.<br /> Charles Shere - CRITICS CIRCLE <br />April 3, 1968 <br />[transcription of unscripted remarks] <br /><br />I would like to talk about the PBL [Public Broadcast Laboratory] broadcast of last Sunday night because for the first time PBL give its two hours over entirely to a cultural program — and it gave those two hours to the avant-garde — which is very much, of course, in controversy these days, being only some thirty or forty years old. PBL's program was called <em>Who's Afraid Of The Avant-Garde?</em>: an excessively coy title which I think established PBL's stance toward the subject of its program. <br />It was never quite sure what its stance was going to be. Television can either act as a recorder, the kind of television that says "let's pretend you're at the Buffalo museum or let's pretend you're at the ball game and we will take you electronically there and you can carry it from there,” or television can act as a participant — and PBL attempted this a couple of times in Sunday night's broadcast.<br />When it did make this attempt, and when it succeeded, it came up with the most exciting things that it did the entire evening. I'm thinking, for example, of their coverage of Cecil Taylor's jazz group. I'm thinking also of the first coverage of Merce Cunningham's Dance Company, when the television entered and participated in Cunningham's dance and did considerably more than taking you out of your living room and putting you down in the auditorium. <br />By and large, however, PBL's attitude toward the avant-garde was very much conditioned by what I guess it feared was a recalcitrant audience nationwide; and perhaps that audience is more recalcitrant than we would think, living as we do in the San Francisco Bay Area, an area which is by no means representative of the country as a whole. For example, there were frequent statements on the part of the narrator that the difference between the avant-garde art and normal art was that avant-garde art does not care at all about any kind of representationalism. Taylor's music, for example, it was stressed, had no beat and no recognizable melody. When some underground films were shown, specifically Jonas Mekas’s film <em>Circus</em>, the narrator made a great point of saying that underground.films share the avant-garde prejudice against heroes, against plots, against stories, just as the avant-garde paintings and sculpture is non-representatlonal. It seems to me that there is a reason for this and that this is symptomatic, rather than the end result, of an attitude of the avant-garde artist. I was looking at a copy of a new book which came out recently published by Walker and Company, a book about the French sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon, who died in 1918, and in looking through this book it struck me that his career sums up the difficult time in western art which took place at the turn of the nineteenth century. It was a critical turning point, I think, in European history, certainly in the history of European civilization.<br />It was the transition between the teleological representational attitude of art until then and the new art which is the art of the 20th Century, representing <em>homo ludens</em>, man who plays games, man who is more concerned with the experience and with the integrity of what he is doing, of his activity, than he is with the pre-conceived concept of what kind of goal he is going to find at the end of his activity. In other words, where the nineteenth century and earlier thought of art as being a search with a goal at the end of the search, today's artists like John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Jonas Mekas, all of the people who were touched upon by PBL, are not concerned with what they are going to find at the end of their search… if you can call it a search. They seem to be considerably more concerned with what it is they’re doing while they’re filling the time ….<br />And I think that there is probably a lesson for all of us in this. I think that civilization gets the art that it gets because it is the civilization that it is. I think that our avant-garde art partakes of this quality partly because today the artist and intellectual, when he realizes it, is a little bit tired of the civilization which is founded upon things, upon works of art which have commercial value, upon having as late a model of car as your neighbor, and this whole sort of thing.<br />It's still very difficult to talk about avant-garde art and about Dada, its progenitor, because like PBL we tend to lump all of this activity into one bag. To think, for example, of Buckminister Fuller as being avant-garde, to think of Mary Quant, the fashion designer in England of being avant-garde, the same way as John Cage and Merce Cunningham are avant-garde. Of course this is perfectly absurd. There is a great difference between an industrial architect and an avantgarde fashion designer on the one hand and a painter and a musician on the other. And as John Calder says in his introduction to a new book about English happeners, talking about surrealism. "It will quickly lose its sense of identity as an art movement and become a technique to be used to a greater or a lesser extent by dramatists and artists of the future.”<br />I think this is true of the avant-garde and it’s true of Dada, and I think that programs like last Sunday's PBL, excellent in places and pedestrian in others, will help to accelerate this feeling, will help to accelerate the possibility of all of these phenomena, with the avant-garde being assimilated not only by the artists themselves but also by we the audience, the people whom the artists serve, the people who in the last analysis feed upon and, in turn, nourish the artistic activity itself. <br /><br />Well, all of this said, I went out to Mills College Sunday night to see what was supposed to be an evening of Dada and about the only Dada on the evening's program were two films, a marvelous film by Hans Richter called <em>Ghosts Before Breakfast</em>, a film made in 1927, and Ferdinand Leger's <em>Ballet Mechanique</em>, a film made in 1924. I think that its greatly to television's credit that things like PBL are doing programs like that of the avant-garde. Certainly television should be reviving these early films, early experimental films and the recent experimental films as well. Television is the perfect medium of making these films an accepted part of our inheritance, just as the <em>Mona Lisa</em> is, for example, or <em>September Morn</em> was fifty years ago. And until this has become a common part of the culture, the importance and vitality of Dada and the avant-garde will be lost on most of us.<br />At Mills College there were also some musical performances, notably of the <em>Three Miniatures</em> for violin and piano by Krzysztof Penderecki and, before that, the Four Pieces for violin and piano by Anton Webern. These were very sensitively played by Nathan Rubin who was accompanied by Naomi Sparrow (who played, incidentally, the best I've heard her yet). The Webern could not he heard too well because of a marvelous crotchety woman who was in the audience banging her cane on the floor and barking like a dog from time to time. She was, I suppose, the most Dada of them all at Mills College.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/10/asdf.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-6987689514849844071Mon, 25 Sep 2017 17:48:00 +00002017-09-25T10:48:40.779-07:00Manifesto, 1966<big>F</big><small>ROM SOME TIME</small> in 1966, this rather breathless and no doubt far too dense summary of what I had then come to believe:<br /><br />The important things to me as an onlooker having been the sound (in music) the quick immediate appearance (in visuals) or (intermedia) the combination of these always coupled with not the way these final impacts, these appearances, were made (I don't care how it sounds Feldman says Boulez wrote, What I want to know is how was it made) but the way they happen once they have been made inevitably to happen. What it comes down to is an interest, no a concern with process: not techniques of writing/composing/painting/causing inevitably to happen but the objective fact or process or progression from (a point which can never be determined) to (a final position I at least will never fix). Cases in point being the whole Bride, the whole Joyce, the whole dada-surrealism-mid-twentieth century avant garde. The whole Mahler. Any individual Webern. Virtually any one opera. In short, any (apparently) closed microcosm, any closed system. Robbe-Grillet, <em>Marienbsd</em>, <em>Blow-Up</em>, Ionesco, Beckett. Getting lost in one luxuriant paragraph on the island in <em>To The Lighthouse</em> or <em>Patriarchal Poetry</em> or one stanza in <em>The Faerie Queene</em> or a metaphysical poet or wandering in the garden of a composition by Loren Rush or Bob Moran or a painting by Chirico or Magritte or Klee or Vermeer or the wake early in <em>L'Etranger</em> or the word <em>chair</em> in <em>L'Age de raison</em>. Tzara. Conversations with Jon Cott, David Abel, Karlheinz Stockhausen. Performances by Nelson Green, Bob Moran, David Tudor, Toshi Ichiyanagi. Ives: 4th Symphony, piano music, <em>Central Park</em>, <em>Set For Theater Orchestra</em>. Ashley's <em>Frogs</em>. David Goines at work, or Julia Child. This kind of process turns out to be a kind of texture always involving contemplation, but an exploratory kind of contemplation. The activity of absorption. No sort of time process at all. A physical visual impingement surpassing those objectivities set in motion by egos or personalities or intellects, and so we must restrict ourselves to gestures, to activity, to performance, and our reflections must be on the gestures activities &amp; performances. Leave quickly when someone begins a presentation. Everything hard quick &amp; committed, and full full full full. But serene in its vitality &amp; its integrity. And the responses must be quick: no delay. But also no analyzed response, no conditioning: come when you're called, don't bring anything with you. Entities are discrete: constituents disappear within integrated contexts. No viewpoints, no perspective, no beyond, behind, this side or that. An unassailable logic of inevitability is the only teleology to be permitted. Make everything that concerns you an object of your concern, and mind your own business in a businesslike way. And once having committed yourself to that concern, no betrayal of commitment. The subject (of commitment, of concern), being secondary, disappears: cf. <em>The Art</em> (or Process) <em>of Fugue</em>. The agent, having acted, is unnecessary, and withdraws. This is what Dedalus meant by dramatic art. What's left is the process. No room any more for the heroic epic between the objective lyricism which is mood &amp; the lyrical object of process. And having restricted ourselves to the business of being concerned with our gestures our activities our performances, seeing ourselves within the contemplative exploratory luxuriant texture we make of our microcosm. Abandoning a world only when it is fully known; until then returning as often as necessary; but abandoning any world unalterably when it is devoid of surprise. And never offering the insult of familiarity to any living thing (and all things live) but always granting to life the dignity of concern. And maintaining the joy of discovery, and the obligation of continuance, &amp; the vitality: being.<br /><br /><big>A</big><small>LL OF WHICH</small> I though I summed up, later, more efficiently if perhaps more opaquely, in this short poem:<br /><br /><div align="center"><big><em>David Goines Contemplating the back of an axe.</em></big></div><br /><div><br /></div>http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/09/manifesto-1966.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-4445088500277062290Tue, 12 Sep 2017 00:03:00 +00002017-09-11T17:03:07.306-07:00Doggerel written while driving north <div align="right"><em>Highway 101, September 11, 2017—</em></div> <p><big>S</big><small>OMETIMES WHILE DRIVING</small> or riding on these car trips silly verse jumps into my mind:</p> <p>1.<br><br>An ant is on my seat<br>A moose steps on my feet<br>A cat nibbles my apple pie<br>A worm lives in the beet<br><br></p> <p>A crow flies in the sky<br>A cat nibbles my pie<br>A dog drinks all the Chinese tea<br>Six chickens learn to fly<br><br></p> <p>There is no pie for me<br>A dog drinks all the tea<br>A fish swims in the goldfish bowl<br>An owl sits on my knee<br><br></p> <p>Three robbers steal the coal<br>A fish swims in the bowl<br>Lions lie on the dusty beach<br>Under the bridge, a troll<br><br></p> <p>Thank god, they're out of reach <br>Those lions on the beach<br>You know it isn't very far<br>Please, may I have a peach<br><br></p> <p>Cows fly up to the star<br>It isn't very far<br>There must be something dreadful wrong<br>My shoes are full of tar<br><br></p> <p>We have to end this song<br>I think there's something wrong <br>Whatever you may think you think<br>It has gone on too long<br><br>2.<br><br></p> <p>The cat's at the whisky, the mice at the rum!<br>The carpenter's clawhammer's beat up his thumb!<br>Little Jack Horner can't get at his plum!<br>Calamity! Catastrophe!<br><br></p> <p>The children have mostly been fed to the bears!<br>Aunt Martha chokes while putting on airs!<br>Grandfather, drunk again, falls down the stairs!<br>Catastrophe! Calamity! <br><br></p> <p>Those mischievous boys have derailed the train!<br>The surgeon's knife slips while inspecting a brain!<br>The turkeys all drown looking up at the rain!<br>Calamity! Catastrophe!<br><br></p> <p>An elephant's eaten our favorite plants!<br>Apes have intruded and spoiled the dance!<br>The firemen have rushed off, forgetting their pants!<br>It's a Calamity!<br><br></p> <p>Thieves stole all the instruments, left just one gong!<br>All the band's music sounds terribly wrong!<br>Everything's off, nothing seems to belong!<br>Calamity! It's a Catastrophe!<br><br></p> <p>Trump's in the White House, and Ryan and Mitch<br>Make our eyelids break into a nervous twitch!<br>And the Press has worked up to a fever pitch —<br>Calamity! It's a real Catastrophe!</p>http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/09/doggerel-written-while-driving-north.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-1635501126892120663Sun, 27 Aug 2017 22:40:00 +00002017-08-27T15:40:23.660-07:00Back to the desk<div align="right"><em>Eastside Road, August 27, 2017—</em><br></div><table align=left width="200" border="0"><tr><td><strong>Ali A. Rizvi: <em>The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason</strong></em><br><small>New York: St. Martin's Press,<br>2016 <br>ISBN 978-1-250-09444-5<br>pp. 226&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<em>read 8/24/17</em></small></td></tr> <p><tr><td><br><strong>Frans de Waal: <em>Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?</strong></em><br><small>New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,<br>2016 <br>ISBN 978-1-250-09444-5<br>pp. 275&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<em>read 8/26/17</em></small></td></tr></table><big>T</big><small>HE LAST FEW MONTHS</small> have not been the best, as readers of this blog — and particularly the other one — will have suspected. I'm not complaining: plenty of others have it a great deal worse. It's largely a matter, I suppose, of aging: I've just gone past 82.</p> <p>Nor is it simply a matter of fatigue, lack of stamina, and a chronic backache, serves me right for always suspecting those who announce that complaint of malingering. Nor is it only the political situation, extremely depressing — I am convinced we are on our way to dictatorship, perhaps a new form of it with puppet congress and courts, and publicly owned lands and other goods (museums, libraries, post offices) turned over to private business. Perhaps even the military.</p> <p>So I've taken a vacation of sorts from the blogs, spending my time on baseball games (only a couple of them live in ball park) and writing. (The last two posts here offered you peeks at the process.) This has occasioned reading through pocket calendars, journals, and reviews from the 1960s and '70s, and the difference between those times and the present has been striking to say the least. To bring me back to the present, two books caught my eye in the last week or two.</p> <p>Ali Rizvi's <em>The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason</em> was recommended somewhere online, I no longer recall where. (I haven't been keeping up with my usual book review sites: <em>The Nation</em>, NYRB, and so on.) The title promised a good fit to the mood I've been in since the election. Dedicated readers of mine may recall my writing last April about this: <blockquote>Belief, faith, knowledge : I began this month’s musings planning to contemplate my feelings about religion: past and permanence, decay and defiance, self and society, faith and belief, fact and facticity, life and death. Maladjustment of my own cells has made me more than normally aware of mortality. And what have the trams and ruins of Rome brought me to contemplate? Cats and garbage heaps on which grain had taken root over the years. Gardens and palazzi ; conversations with strangers; public behavior; the embrace of family; a toy boat; a pile of broken pots. The events and detritus of everyday life, in short. Nothing special, but constant reminders that there are things we see and so believe we know, transactions we share and so know we feel, concepts (and constructs) we hear or read about and so strive to understand. And I keep coming back to Montaigne: <em>Que sais-je</em>, What do I know?<br><div align=right><a href="http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/04/rome-14-controllers-of-destiny.html"><em>The Eastside View: Rome, 14</a></em></div></p> <p></blockquote>Rizvi's book is far from perfect (I am hardly the writer to complain of imperfect books), but I think it is worth reading; perhaps even imperative reading in these times. Born in Pakistan, brought up in Libya and Saudi Arabia before moving with his parents to Canada and the United States, he observed the doctrinaire Muslim culture of Saudi Arabia from a protected position as the son of professionals living in a protected enclave.</p> <p>This did not prevent his close reading of Quran and <em>hadith</em>, the twin written foundations of Islam. The internal contradictions in those writings, and their uneasy applicability to life in a post-Rationalist world, set him on the course described by his subtitle: a (personal) journey from religion to reason. Rizvi is a physician, hence a scientist; and he holds Islam — and Judaism and Christianity — up to a scientist's skepticism. As I myself think we must all do in these times when the inherently authoritative desert monotheisms seem increasingly at war, figuratively and literally, with contemporary society as it has evolved.</p> <p>After a couple of hundred pages describing his own growing rejection of Islam, in the course of which Rizvi cites scripture as well as personal experience, he comes to the point: the solution to much of the present war in the Middle East — and the growing problems in the US with radically fundamentalist Christianity, though that's a bit outside the scope of his book — is reformation. He suggests a four-step process: Rejection of scriptural inerrancy, Reformation, Secularism, and Enlightenment.</p> <p>But even the first step is dauntingly difficult in societies whose very identity — and whose individuals participate in this identity — is bound from birth with a sacred text. Muslims may be fundamentalist, lax, or even (as in Rizvi's case) atheist (or at least agnostic), but they are Muslims because of their common cultural grounding in Quran and <em>hadith</em>. It took Christianity some 1600 years to reach the Enlightenment, and a lot of blood was spilled along the way; there's no reason to think the path will be any easier for Islam.<hr><big>I</big><small>T WAS A RELIEF</small> to turn from "faith" and "belief" to cognition — scientifically verifiable examples of memory, invention, and reason. Even if the examples were not from the doings of men and women, religious or not, but those of other primates, of octopodes and dolphins, of elephants and corvids. When I was a boy it was taken as fact that the lower animals were incapable of reason, of language, even of feeling pain. De Waal's book persuades otherwise, relying on his own experience with primates and the work of colleagues and forerunners in this fascinating field.</p> <p>Much changed in that work over the last few decades, beginning with the suspension of the axiom that we humans are an essentially different and nobler animal than all the others. Observations in the wild (think Goodall) and experimentation in the laboratory revealed, once that prejudice was relinquished, that all animals communicate and many understand, or at least work with, memory, even with the concept of futurity. Such social animals as chimpanzees and bonobos, elephants and whales clearly have evolved language skills and evidence of economic and political methodology.</p> <p>De Waal is a scientist and does not take up the question of religion. Perhaps this is the one thing that separates us humans from the other animals. I like to think that in this respect they may have evolved beyond us, to a stable point in their own evolution which dispenses with religion. Or perhaps Homo sapiens has evolved to need religion in order to externalize the intrinsic tribalism he shares with certain other apes, to justify irrational action when he knows better. We may hope for another book from de Waal:</p> <strong><em>Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart WE are?</em></strong>http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/08/back-to-desk.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-524955243360700949Fri, 18 Aug 2017 19:01:00 +00002017-08-18T12:01:46.012-07:00from Calls and Singing, for chamber orchestra<p style="margin: 0px 0px 5px 36px; font-size: 9px; line-height: normal; font-family: Avenir; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: #000000;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><strong>1968: from Calls and Singing</strong></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1px 9px; text-align: justify; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal; font-family: Baskerville; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: #000000;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Note beginning the pocket calendar for 1968: </span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1px 9px; text-align: justify; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal; font-family: Baskerville; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: #000000;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HPVHa3Z7FYA/WZc5aY7-1hI/AAAAAAAAO80/SCeZteaNKz8v4d0F0FWTz3CBkeZLjF4qQCLcBGAs/s1600/note.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HPVHa3Z7FYA/WZc5aY7-1hI/AAAAAAAAO80/SCeZteaNKz8v4d0F0FWTz3CBkeZLjF4qQCLcBGAs/s320/note.jpeg" width="320" height="125" data-original-width="1332" data-original-height="522" /></a></div></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 4px 9px; text-align: justify; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal; font-family: Baskerville; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: #000000;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">and, later in the calendar,</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 4px 36px; font-size: 9px; line-height: normal; font-family: Avenir; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: #000000;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">do string orchestra piece on E, A</span><span style="font-size: 10px; line-height: normal; font-family: 'Opus PlainChords Std'; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">b</span><span style="font-kerning: none;">, C: for music for orchestra?</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 4px 36px; font-size: 9px; line-height: normal; font-family: Avenir; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: #000000;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">write a piece like a football game. Players come in, go out, carry signals etc.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 4px 36px; font-size: 9px; line-height: normal; font-family: Avenir; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: #000000;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">make a piece which gradually becomes metric — approaches a drive</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 4px 36px; font-size: 9px; line-height: normal; font-family: Avenir; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: #000000;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">make a piece with overlapping variable ostinati of various styles</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1px 9px; text-align: justify; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal; font-family: Baskerville; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: #000000;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">Paul Freeman, a young conductor then directing the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, asked me to write a new piece for a concert that would also feature a work by Heuwell Tircuit, then a music critic (one of three or four!) on the San Francisco <em>Chronicle</em>. (I had met Paul earlier at a master class for conductors led by Richard Lert; I think we televised it.) For some time I couldn’t imagine what I could provide for a small chamber orchestra, lacking trombones, and percussion, until Nelson Green, visiting one day, pointed out that I could provide whatever I wanted to. This broke the mental block and the result, <em>from Calls and Singing</em>, was the second orchestral piece (after my <em>Small Concerto</em>) that I managed to hear played. </span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1px 9px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal; font-family: Baskerville; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: #000000;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">The score bears an epigraph, from Gertrude Stein’s <em>A Sonatina followed by another</em>: “Call to me with frogs and birds and moons and stars. Call me with noises. Mechanical noises.” The score was as much calligraphy as notation, and David Goines lovingly printed it for me in an edition of a number of copies. Paul conducted clock-style; the strings of his orchestra played overlapping washes of melody; woodwinds and brass alternated between conventional sounds and “extended technique” like playing without mouthpieces, or using only the reeds, or playing harmonicas or taxi horns. I thought the result quite beautiful, and so I suppose did Paul, for he repeated it a few years later with the Detroit Symphony on a special concert, drawing contemptuous reviews from a local critic or two.</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1px 9px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal; font-family: Baskerville; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: #000000;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><em>from Calls and Singing</em> (the lower-case initial letter is intended, though difficult to force: the idea was to suggest an absent because inexpressible opening) continued the indeterminacy of <em>Nightmusic</em> but added physical separation to the mix. It begins, for example, with the orchestral tuning (an idea from Stockhausen, I think), and much of the time the wind-players are wandering among the audience. It is, though, in general a gentle piece, and everyone seemed to like it, even Heuwell</span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1px 9px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal; font-family: Baskerville; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: #000000;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></p><p style="margin: 0px 0px 1px 9px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 18px; font-size: 10px; line-height: normal; font-family: Baskerville; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: #000000;"><span style="font-kerning: none;">See the complete 12 pages of score as a pdf <a href="http://www.shere.org/pdfs/fromCandS.pdf">here</a></span></p>http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/08/from-calls-and-singing-for-chamber.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-2649371757394700799Mon, 14 Aug 2017 18:53:00 +00002017-08-14T11:53:43.313-07:00Getting on with the memoir<p><big>A</big>&nbsp;<small> FEW READERS</small> have responded to the previous post, offering a draft version of the first section of a new memoir, with comments and in some cases welcome corrections or suggestions. Many thanks to them. <p>Herewith, part two, covering 1967 to 1972, when I was working at KQED while tapering off work at KPFA. This was an intense and interesting time: the 1960s were winding down, and so were freewheeling broadcasting, open-form music and play-for-nothing new music concerts, and the marginal gallery scene. I don’t suppose we knew it at the time, but increased commercialization and the reach to bigger audiences was about to change everything that seemed to interest me, at the same time that our children were growing into their teens and Chez Panisse opened (in 1971), quite changing family dynamics. <p>Once again I make a <strong>DRAFT</strong> pdf of this memoir available. It runs to 85 pages, 1.3 MB of data. It is only a draft; more illustrations will be added as well as expansions of descriptions of people and places — and, I hope, responses to your comments and suggestions.</p> <p>Read and download Part Two <a href="http://www.shere.org/pdfs/StandingBy2.pdf">HERE</a><br>Read and download Part One <a href="http://www.shere.org/pdfs/StandingBy1.pdf">HERE</a><p>And remember: this is not for distribution, only for single-person use; and I may well take the material down after it has served its purpose.</p>http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/08/getting-on-with-memoir.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-1857876009456766036Sat, 05 Aug 2017 14:08:00 +00002017-08-05T07:08:50.686-07:00memoir<p><big>I</big> <small>HAVE BEEN BUSY</small> writing further in my memoir — "further," because I've already published a volume covering my first thirty years.</p> <blockquote><small><strong>Getting There</strong>. Ear Press, 2007; 212 pages. Growing up in Berkeley, 1935-1945, and on a hardscrabble farm in Sonoma county, 1945-1952; college in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Berkeley; early marriage and children; beginning to learn about Modernism, writing, and the composition of music. ISBN 978-0-6151-5935-5 Available from Lulu 1487909, pb $20 (e-book $9.99, Lulu 18655161, iBookstore), or from such websites as Amazon.com</small></blockquote> <p>I've completed a first draft of the next volume, which runs from 1964 on to 1974 — years when I was on staff at KPFA and KQED, when I began teaching at Mills College, and began writing for the Oakland Tribune. This will probably run to 250 pages or so in print, and be subdivided into four main sections: <blockquote><a href="http://www.shere.org/pdfs/StandingBy1.pdf">1: KPFA, 1964-1967</a><br>2: KQED, 1967-1972<br>3: Juggling Jobs, 1972-1974<br>4: In print, 1974-1976</blockquote></p> <p>As I've been working on this I've been struck by what an interesting time those years were, perhaps especially in the San Francisco Bay Area. I write about KPFA and my work there, of course, but also about family life, my musical composition, the musicians and others I got to know — and Berkeley as a backdrop. <p>But I may be overly enthusiastic. After giving some thought to the idea, I've decided to make the first section available as a pdf on my website. Interested readers can download it by clicking <a href="http://www.shere.org/pdfs/StandingBy1.pdf">here</a> where it should appear as a PDF running to 76 pages. <p>I ask that these pages not be printed out, or, if so, not distributed. I welcome any suggestions or corrections. And I reserve the right to take the pdf down from my website as time goes by… <p>And do let me know if you cannot find or download the pdf.</p>http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/08/memoir.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-6498428941284900906Sun, 25 Jun 2017 16:01:00 +00002017-06-25T09:01:57.533-07:00New book from Rome: Where to Dig, and How Far Down<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-p36yp6BV1AM/WU_c7Re8pQI/AAAAAAAAO5Q/kEHuJEs5UV04rM5F1Bry2PkvgteeG6O6ACLcBGAs/s1600/product_thumbnail.php.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-p36yp6BV1AM/WU_c7Re8pQI/AAAAAAAAO5Q/kEHuJEs5UV04rM5F1Bry2PkvgteeG6O6ACLcBGAs/s320/product_thumbnail.php.jpg" width="212" height="320" data-original-width="212" data-original-height="320" /></a></div><div align="right"><em>Portland, June 25, 2017—</em></div> <big>P</big><small>UBLISHED</small>, <small>HERE AT</small> peripatetic Ear Press: <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/charles-shere/where-to-dig-and-how-far-down/paperback/product-23232701.html"><em>Where to Dig, and How Far Down</em></a>, an 80-page paperbound book containing the writing posted here last April while I was in Rome. <p>Well, the title. You have to give a book a title, and something like <em>Rome, April 2017</em> seems pretty lame. (Although it would probably get more clicks: Rome is a popular subject. I followed my usual process when titles don't come readily to mind: open the proof copy half-way and look for a random phrase. No luck. All right, open another half way to the end. Still no luck. <p>Hmmm. Zeno warns against proceeding further toward the end of the book; let's go halfway back to the last halfway point. Ah, there it is: <blockquote>Poor Italy! Preserving, interpreting, ignoring these ruins, these and many others — Italic, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, even medieval — must be a constant headache. The archaeologists have to decide where to dig, and how far down. The government, I suppose, has to decide when to protect, when to recognize the futility of any thought of perfect control. And of course these historical records are an important tourist attraction; Christian or not, one goes to Rome to savor and contemplate all this history. </blockquote> I've been working on another writing project, whose results may or may not appear here. It's a study of the ruins of my life — something of intermittent interest to me, but probably to few others. The first question, then, is how to make it interesting: but short of that process there's the mining, the digging down through such ruins as journals, clippings, pocket calendars, photographs. <p>And, always, <em>memory</em>. I relied on virtually nothing but memory in my first venture in memoir, <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Getting-There-Charles-Shere/dp/0615159354">Getting There</a></em>, published ten years ago: two hundred pages covering my first thirty years. That book, I thought, might have some value as a cautionary, and I gave copies to various grandchildren as they left high school: Don't commit to a career too soon, be ready to profit from luck, embrace the liberal arts, that sort of thing. <p>This next venture, though, has to be written differently. For one thing there's a lot of public record: my own career, which took me into journalism of sorts, was not only public but also documented through clippings and the like. Better check those memories out in case you have entirely the wrong date — or, worse, the wrong source, or the wrong guy! <p>But it's always a question of where to dig, and how far down. It's easy to get distracted. There's also the danger that the act of digging will destroy the stuff you're digging through — in this case, wrecking a story by getting it straight. <p>In any case, this Rome book turned out, I think, to be a series of meditations — on history and the present, Christianity and not, faith and belief, thinking and walking. That delicious conversation between inner contemplation and outer observation so facilitated by travel, especially this kind, anchored to an unfamiliar residence for a month, but within a setting familiar from previous visits over the years, rich with its own history Thucydides knows, but made richer by conversations with a granddaughter who lives there, and shared with other members of the family. <p>Anyhow, I'm rambling. <a href="http://www.lulu.com/shop/charles-shere/where-to-dig-and-how-far-down/paperback/product-23232701.html"><em>Where to Dig, and How Far Down</em></a>. Healdsburg: Ear Press (self-published through my favored online publisher Lulu), 2017. 80 pages, paper, b&w photos. $7.95 plus postage. Click on title to order. http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/06/new-book-from-rome-where-to-dig-and-how.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-6777319392957083031Thu, 22 Jun 2017 19:48:00 +00002017-06-22T12:56:01.394-07:00Más poesía<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-50F9plcLhsM/WUwbRkoDRTI/AAAAAAAAO38/196CUWOUghA-r7wbvAifHb4b6SLV0rd2gCLcBGAs/s1600/19366121_10155423904447162_5639322607992540705_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-50F9plcLhsM/WUwbRkoDRTI/AAAAAAAAO38/196CUWOUghA-r7wbvAifHb4b6SLV0rd2gCLcBGAs/s320/19366121_10155423904447162_5639322607992540705_n.jpg" width="280" height="280" data-original-width="320" data-original-height="320" /></a></div><div align="right"><i><small>Portland, Oregon, June 22, 2017— </small></i></div><big><i>A</big> <small>FRIEND WROTE</small> of this photo, which I don't particularly like, that it made me look like a Latin-American revolutionary poet, so here's the beginning of a new career:</i><p><big>Contemplación</big><p>se necesita tiempo morir<br>el corazón se detiene, <br>el cerebro jadea por el oxígeno<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;o no <p>los tejidos blandos se disuelven <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;o se comen <p>dientes y huesos duran<br>quizás muchos años<br><p>líneas de ferrocarril oxidadas, rotas<br>viaductos de hormigón<p> el bosque crece lentamente<br>sobre los restos<p><p><p>las lunas sin número puntúan la vida <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;desapercibida <br>pequeñas lesiones <br>que se extienden a través de los huesos <p>poblaciones <br>que emigran a través de las catástrofeshttp://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/06/mas-poesia.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-5558410299415655649Tue, 13 Jun 2017 14:01:00 +00002017-06-13T07:02:38.246-07:00EIGHTS AND TWOS FOR LINDSEY ON HER 82d<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cVu7iG9yGfM/WT_vkilUngI/AAAAAAAAO2I/GPHHS_K1xu8Uw9IMy4593m0IaflTz3VugCLcB/s1600/IMG_2397.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cVu7iG9yGfM/WT_vkilUngI/AAAAAAAAO2I/GPHHS_K1xu8Uw9IMy4593m0IaflTz3VugCLcB/s320/IMG_2397.jpg" width="296" height="320" data-original-width="1199" data-original-height="1297" style float="right"/></a><div align="right"><em>Eastside Road, June 10, 2017—</em></div> <small><i>which fell in fact on the seventh</i></small><p><p> <big> Great day!<br><br> Though the days grow short: busy suns<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;rise, set<br>as the hours used to do, and now<br> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;years gone,<br><br> most of them with you, and better<br> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;for that.<br>(Of course I can only hope you<br> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;agree.)<br><br> Never more beautiful or more<br> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;graceful<br>whether patient or not, gentle<br> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;friend and<br>sharp critic sharing this long life<br> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;of ours.<br><br> Let the whole world know how much I<br> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;love you.http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/06/e-ights-and-twos-for-lindsey-on-her-82d.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-8320959078738321366Fri, 09 Jun 2017 18:30:00 +00002017-06-09T14:57:19.792-07:00Cats<div align="right"><em>Eastside Road, June 9, 2017—</em></div> <table align=left><tr><td>Thomas McNamee:<br> <em>The Inner Life of Cats</em><br>New York: Hachette, 2017 <br>pp. 278&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<em>read 6/5/17</em><p>Carl Van Vechten:<br> <em>The Tiger in the House</em><br>New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924 <br>pp. 367&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<em>read 6/9/17</em></td></tr></table><big>A</big><small>NOTHER BOOK</small> by another friend, and read with pleasure. McNamee's writing is always well researched and informative in detail, and this latest title is, I think, even more gracefully written than previous books. And the subject-matter is close to my heart: not the wolves and grizzly bears of his previous books on animals, but <em>Felis silvestris catus</em>, the house-cat. <p>There are probably almost as many books about cats as there are about Abraham Lincoln, of course, and I haven't read that many of them. Some purport to be owner's manuals. Some are technical, and McNamee cites more than one of these. Some are basically literary, like my favorite, <em>The Tiger in the House</em>, about which more later. <p>McNamee:<blockquote>Unfortunately there are a lot of mediocre cat books out there. The best way to know a good one is to see how well it recognizes the essentially wild nature of the beast… There have been, recently, some books that purport to be grounded in science but make no attempt to understand the subjective experience of cats. Without that, you will never have the slightest sense of who your cat really is. </blockquote><em>The Inner Life of Cats</em> is, then, by its own standards, a good cat book. I suppose it's of more practical value to a cat owner (or prospective owner) than to one who is, like me, catless; but having shared my house and home with cats — "ownership" has always seemed a problematic word and concept, to me, when applied to pets in general, cats in particular — I read this book with great interest and increasing gratitude. <p>McNamee's story begins when he finds an abandoned kitten in the Montana snow, adopts it, and learns to share his life with her. He alternates between Augusta's biography as it intersects with his, on the one hand, and, on the other, considerations of more general catness. He writes about whether cats think or talk (they do); whether they're wild or domesticated (wild); how they grow from kittenhood into being a cat. <p>He writes about how a cat can attain a good life even shared with humans, even living indoors — neither of which, I think, is truly instinctive to the cat. He writes about the cat's maturity and health, its various disorders, aging, and death. <p>And in a final chapter he writes, this chronicler of animals-as-they-are, about Love, which is after all the highest and perhaps the instinctive reason we humans live with cats. McNamee could have got into trouble here, I think. I've read a few reviews of <em>The Inner Life of Cats</em> on the Internet site Goodreads — I really must write about this site one day, it and Librarything — and more than one take him to task for bringing up the unpleasant fact of the death of cats: ours is an evasive culture, often, preferring to pretend such unpleasantness is the exclusive domain of foreigners. <p>(But I will never forget the death of our own first cat, the superb Loplop, who died probably of feline leukemia (oddly, an unpleasantness McNamee touches too little for other reviewers), only ten years old or so. Loplop died at home, in his favorite sleeping place, patiently, and taught me much about stoicism, a useful lesson, as it's turned out.) <p>McNamee's delicacy of writing runs through his entire book, and his discretion is evident from his dedication: not to Augusta, the marvelous black stray whose life and death inspire <em>The Inner Life of Cats</em>, but to Isabel the living cat who succeeded her in the McNamee household. Cats remind us to celebrate those gone but to attend to those who are with us. <p>I was particularly interested in the chapter on feral cats, which describes in some detail the recent history of the cats of the Largo Argentina in Rome. In doing so it describes also some differences I've noted between Italians and Americans:<blockquote>American wildlife scientists tend toward attire somewhere between safari and thrift shop, and usually need better haircuts. Eugenia Natoli [a biologist who has organized the mostly volunteer attention to the Argentina colony] dresses with elegant flair, tailored jackets, slim skirts, silk scarves, fine jewelry, high heels, just-so coiffure. Luigi Boitani, one of the world's most renowned wildlife scientists, is given to silky tweed, chic dark shirts, cashmere sweaters over the shoulder…</blockquote>The entire Largo Argentina story cleared up a mystery for me: why there used to be so many cats there, and why now there are so comparatively few. And the work of these volunteer <em>gattari</em>, who see to the nutrition and medical attention these cats need (including, of course, sterilization), the way the operation is funded and insinuated into the municipal government, can be taken as a model for less enlightened communities, depending as much on intelligence and research as it does on enthusiasm. <p>McNamee writes about the dangers our cats face. One was quite familiar to me: the over-eager neighbor who feeds your cat junk. Another danger to cats when they're out of doors (which of course is where they really want to be): predators. Coyotes are increasingly common in American cities. Here on Eastside Road, there are also bobcats. Overhead their are hawks and owls. Our neighbors have lost cats to such dangers, and of course to the road in front of their house. <p>I think of our Sally, another Berkeley cat of ours, who our daughter-in-law's cat the aptly named Tarantula was jealous of, and used to chase into the street, particularly if traffic was present. Sally finally took the hint and went away altogether. McNamee offers helpful guidance for such a situation, but that was in the days before microchips… <p>McNamee proposes a fine way for society to take care of lost cats and feral population:<blockquote>Let the states pass laws mandating the licensing of all cats, using implanted microchips. The licensing fee must be very small — perhaps free if you can't afford it. Every person who takes a cat to be neutered gets a cash payment of one hundred dollars (and a license if the cat doesn't have one). … The money comes from private groups and government grants. It will not be long before governments realize they are spending less on that program than they previously spent rounding up and sheltering stray cats.</blockquote> It's a fine balance of logic, pragmatics, and sympathy, this book; thankfully there's a decent index and bibliography, and I'm grateful to McNamee for the care and research he brought to writing it. I'm grateful, too, that it sent me on to another book.<hr>Carl Van Vechten is one of my 20th-century heroes, for his wit, his intelligence, his enthusiasm, and his creative productivity. He had three careers: ten or twelve years as a music critic in New York; another ten or twelve as a smart-alec but sympathetic novelist; finally a photographer of some note. Among his many books I decided to pick up <em>The Tiger in the House</em>, at first simply to investigate its overlap with <em>The Inner Life of Cats</em>, then very quickly to re-read the entire thing, as it had been a long time since I first read it. <p>There is some overlap for sure, particularly I think as the subject turns to the language of cats, and their mystery, and their consequent significance as they share our own lives. But McNamee is a contemporary and, in the best sense, a journalist; he writes for today's readership and draws on today's knowledge. Van Vechten's book is a century old and belongs, I suppose, to another time. <p>But I think it's a time I prefer. Van Vechten is immensely erudite and has studied not only the cat — first-hand, of course, as well as through more distant examples — but also the literature of the cat. The bibliography in my edition of <em>The Tiger in the House</em> (third printing, 1936) runs to forty-eight pages. The many quotations and references are translated into English except those originally in French, which he mainly lets stand in that precise yet evocative language. <p>Like McNamee, Van Vechten introduces us to his "own" cat, Feathers, but not through a parallel structure for his book — more as a fondly observed reference point to the many other specific cats he introduces, real and occasionally fictional. He does touch on the science of felines as it was in his time, but he's skeptical:<blockquote>It has long been a favourite contention of mine that nothing is more ephemeral than science; no books are sooner ready for the garret or the waste-basket than serious books. When a serious book has an artistic value, such as a book by Nietzsche, for instance, the case is altered, but the ordinary professor's or scientist's profound discoveries are absolutely worthless in a few years. They serve, indeed, only to indicate the quaint fluctuations, the ebb and flow, of human thought. The first to admit this is the scientist himself, who tells you that you must work only along the lines of the "latest discoveries." </blockquote> One of the useful lessons Cat teaches is that we should attach as much importance to universal and timeless truths as to immediate and local ones. I think this is one of the subjects latent in the perennial question of Dog or Cat. I myself find ease in simple-minded dialectics, finding for Fitzgerald, not Hemingway; Vermeer, not Rembrandt; France, not England; Ravel, not Debussy; and so on: and in each of those cases I think the cat is associated with the first subject, the dog with the second. England for example is a doggy nation; France, certainly Paris, is feline, no matter how many fashionable little lapdogs are carried about the boulevards in little reticules. Van Vechten:<blockquote>One is permitted to assume an attitude of placid indifference in the matter of elephants, cockatoos, H. G. Wells, Sweden, roast beef, Puccini, and even Mormonism, but in the matter of cats it seems necessary to take a firm stand. The cat himself insists upon this; he invariably inspires strong feelings. </blockquote>This question of Dog or Cat can bring up amusing history. Van Vechten tells us about a minor midwest writer, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who <blockquote>wrote a song called, " Mother, Bring my Little Kitten." "It was supposed," Mrs. Wilcox explains in her priceless book, <em>The Worlds and I</em>, "to be a dying child asking for her pet, which she feared she might not meet in heaven. It was mere sentimental stuff, of no value, of course. But the 'Funny Man' on the Waukesha <em>Democrat</em> (I think that was the paper) poked much fun at me, and said I ought to follow my song with another, 'Daddy, do not drown the puppies.'" Mrs. Wilcox took the suggestion as a cat laps milk and published the new poem in one of the Wisconsin papers. The refrain ran as follows: <blockquote><em>Save, oh, save one puppy, daddy, <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;From a fate so dark and grim —<br>Save the very smallest puppy — <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Make an editor of him.</em> </blockquote></blockquote>I think most writers will enjoy that quatrain. <p>A recurring image in both the books I'm discussing here is the cat who sits at the dining table. Our black cat Joe did that, in our kitchen in Berkeley. Lindsey sat on her chair at one side of the table, I on mine at the other; and Joe sat patiently on a stool between us, on the third side of the table, which stood against the kitchen wall. Now and then — rarely — he put a tentative paw on the edge of the table, in which case I had only to tap it gently and say "foot-fault" and he'd withdraw it. <p>Joe was an outdoor-indoor cat, and lived to be fifteen or so, dying quietly in the back yard in Berkeley, just as we were preparing to sell that house and move to the country. We brought his sister Blanche with us: she was exclusively an outdoor cat, afraid of men including me, a fine hunter and quite independent though our neighbor Mrs. Revsen insisted on giving her junk food "because she is always crying!" <p>We were worried that a cat so white would be easy prey for owls, coyotes, foxes or bobcats, but Blanche did quite well in the country, staying close to the house but mainly supporting herself on mice and voles. (We almost never found telltale feathers along her accustomed routes.) When she died, at nineteen, it was under a rosebush. I think Van Vechten would have enjoyed this.http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/06/cats.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-4950707876153464212Sun, 04 Jun 2017 19:40:00 +00002017-06-04T12:40:41.347-07:00Book not written<div align="right"><em>Eastside Road, June 4, 2017—</em></div> <big>I</big><small>N</small>&nbsp;M<small>ARCH</small>, 1970, I thought about writing a book, whose chapters would be <blockquote>1: 31 for Henry Flynt<br>2: Bottles at the Mud Flats<br>3: Repair art. Wiley. The (triumphant) return of Abstract Expressionism.<br>4: “Making charts to help you know how you know where you are when you get somewhere” (<em>Word Rain</em>, p. 4)<br>5: Your typical bicycle ride<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;and<br>the 4.9 mile drive<br>6: The Richmond Sculpture Annual, Ecology, and Respect for the Object<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;to be followed by<br>7: Hand Tools and Man’s Proper Place<br>8: Lawyers & Priests: footnote on our culture<br>9: Landscapes. gardens. Mahler’s 7th.</blockquote><p>Chapter 1 would have been on a performance I gave of LaMonte Young's <em>Any Integer for Henry Flynt</em>, a piece of conceptual minimalism which consists, as I believe — I don't remember actually seeing a score — of the instruction to strike something with something else any number of times. I used a gong borrowed from the Oakland Symphony. The performance was on the deck of a café or restaurant near Nepenthe, in the Big Sur, on the west side of Highway 1. <p>Chapter 2 would have been about the day Lindsey and I and our three kids, then about ten, seven, and four, spent on the Emeryville mud flats which at the time had for a number of months been the site of impromptu sculpture. Many of these were pretty ramshackle, but a number were quite striking, beautiful even. All were made, for the most part, of material found on the site, stuff that had either been jettisoned or had washed up. <br>What we did, under my direction but with willing enthusiasm and, I think, quasi-intuitive understanding, was pick up every bottle we could find — and there were a good many — and arrange them using plans I no longer remember. Lines, certainly; perhaps masses as well. <p>Chapter 3 would have been about an exhibition I had seen at the old Berkeley Gallery, then on Brannan Street — a group show of marvelous Bay Area artists of the time, artists whose work the press liked to call Bay Area Dada. These were paintings and sculpture which had been repaired, or had been made to be repaired subsequently. Especially memorable, even now, was William Allen's magnificent <em>Shadow Repair for the Western Man</em>, which depicts an unoccupied pair of Levis standing airborne over the Sierra Nevada.<br>William Wiley was at the time producing his first marvelous assemblages responding to Duchamp with sculpture, painting, written material, and the occupation (or, better, articulation) of the space in which it existed. Much of this work of the late 1960s seemed to me to be a logical response to — and continuation of — Abstract Expressionism, in a manner it would have taken that entire chapter to explain: this is no place to attempt it. <p>Chapter 4 is self-explanatory, I think, except to note that <em>Word Rain</em> was a book by Madeline Gins that had made a big impression on me. <p>Chapter 5: I was taking long bicycle rides in those days, and frequently traced (literally) their routes, usually after the fact, on paper laid over USCG topographical maps. I thought of those rides as drawings in time and space. The "4.9 Mile Drive" was a conceptual art work by I forget who, a guided tour of part of the San Francisco industrial area south of Potrero Hill, a spoof of tourguides but also a serious entry to the disclosure of visual beauty and meaning in neglected or unsuspected places. Land Art. <p>Chapter 6: I don't remember what the Sculpture Annual at the Richmond Art Center had involved. Tom Marioni was the curator, and I particularly recall an exhibition there of work by Paul Kos, Tom himself (under a pseudonym), and Terrey Fox: all went on to remarkable careers. In all three cases it seemed to me the meaning of the work lay in the transaction between the artist and his material. Not the technique, the <em>transaction</em>, which respected qualities inherent in the material, either substantially or stemming from its sociological meaning. Here again I would have needed many pages. <p>Chapter 7 would have considered one's state of mind when using and maintaining hand tools while, for example, repairing plumbing, or maintaining the car or the bicycle, or building a bookcase — all things that had frequently to be done. My reading in Zen had led me to believe things went better if one regarded the tool as an equal, not a thing to be exploited. This led, by extension, to the hope that Nature would adopt a similar attitude toward Man. <p>Chapter 8: Ancient Egypt had a surfeit of priests; Babylon a surfeit of accountants; the 20th century a surfeit of lawyers. What doe these conditions lead to? <p>Finally, Chapter 9: Landscape is the ultimate transcending arena in which Nature accommodates whatever it is we inflict on her. Gardens are an attempt to create little landscapes, whether for productive or ornamental purposes. (What's the difference?) The inner movements of Mahler's Seventh Symphony amount to a musical statement of Landscape. <p>That's what I was thinking about in those days, and I see now, reading the journal from that year, that's what I continue to think about. And, I guess, write about. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/06/book-not-written.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-8907118065176768903Tue, 30 May 2017 19:09:00 +00002017-05-30T12:27:52.963-07:00Light Reading; Close Reading<div align="right"><em>Eastside Road, May 30, 2017—</em><br></div><table align=left width="200" border="0"><tr><td><strong>Jean Rhys: <em>Sleep It Off, Lady</strong></em><br>New York: Harper and Row,<br>1976 <br>ISBN 0-06-13572-7<br>pp. 176&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<em>read 5/27/17</em></td></tr></table><big>M</big><small>ARVELOUS LITTLE STORIES</small> here, quietly menacing some of them, all clearly from a feminine point of view but told by children, young women, middle-aged and old women, always with a very authentic voice. The settings range from the British West Indies to London and Paris, and are as persuasively evoked as are the characters. The sixteen stories are arranged in chronological order as to the age of the narrator, adding up to a quiet novella whose manner has affinities with Virginia Woolf, Saki, Rosamond Lehmann (a favorite of mine), and perhaps — this is a stretch — Chekhov; and while many readers will no doubt find them dated I, approaching eighty-two, find them tranquil and wise. And beautifully written.<hr><table align=left width="200"><tr><td><strong>Jonathan Cott: <em>There's a Mystery There</strong></em><br>New York: Doubleday, 2017 <br>ISBN 978-0-385-54043-8<br>pp. 242&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<em>read 5/28/17</em></td></tr></table><big>I</big>'<small>VE KNOWN</small> J<small>ON COTT</small> for fifty years and you will be forgiven for thinking me not an objective reader of his books; perhaps you are right. That will not keep me from writing about his most recent book, a fascinating disquisition on Maurice Sendak and, more particularly, Sendak's book <em>Outside Over There</em>, the less-known conclusion to the trilogy beginning with <em>Where the Wild Things Are</em> and continuing with <em>In the Night Kitchen</em>. <p>Sendak is generally though of as a writer-illustrator of children's books, which is like thinking of Henri Matisse as a painter of interior decor, or Mozart a composer of tunes. True: but things go much deeper than that. It's the going deeper Cott is interested in here, investigating the sources of Sendak's work, and the resonances it has with both psychological and cultural dimensions. I've often quoted here Joseph Kerman's assertion that criticism is "the study of the value and meaning of works of art": in this book Cott emerges as a serious and useful critic. <p>Cott is primarily known, I suppose, as an interviewer: of the nineteen titles listed on the "Also by" page at the front of <em>Outside Over There</em>, five are collections of interviews, or much extended interviews, with subjects ranging from Susan Sontag and John Lennon to Leonard Bernstein and Glenn Gould. He published a first interview with Sendak in <em>Rolling Stone</em>, where he has long been a contributing editor, in 1976, and <em>Outside Over There</em> includes a lot of material from that visit. <p>These conversations with intelligent readers of Sendak, including Sendak himself, reveal the rich and sometimes surprising sources and the patient, gifted making of his books, focusing on <em>Outside Over There</em>. The many references include Mozart, German Romantic painting and literature, child development, psychology; and the persistence of the early 20th-c. Eastern European (specifically Jewish) immigration to New York. The resulting book is patient, complex, rich, closely read, but conversational in tone and fascinating to read. It sends me to the bookstore in search of Sendak, and reminds me to take another look back over the extensive Cott shelf. <p>And I would particularly recommend Cott's book to the parents of small children. There has been controversy as to the propriety of Sendak's books to small children, but Cott, and his conversants, make clear his explorations of loss, rage, sensuality, and other inevitable aspects of childhood can be presented thoughtfully, eased by the delicious beauty of Sendak's art (and writing!). <hr><table align=left width="200" border="0"><tr><td><strong>Georges Perec: <em>“53 Days”</strong></em><br>Edited by Harry Mathews and Jacques Roubaud;<br>tr. David Bellos<br>Boston: David R. Godine,<br>1999 <br>ISBN 1-56792-088-8<br>pp. 260&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<em>read 5/28/17</em></td></tr></table><big>A</big><small>ND HERE IS ANOTHER</small> exercise in Deep Reading which is nonetheless beguiling enough to be a day's summertime reading. Some who know me know that among my harmless eccentricities is a preference to read Complete Works of authors, on the theory that if one book is worth reading, then all the books by that author must be worth reading: this has protected me from Dickens, Balzac, and many other too-prolific writers. And I prefer also to read these books in the order in which they were written, which is why I have not yet got to <em>Moby-Dick</em>, <em>The Golden Bowl</em>, and many another masterpiece. <p>But, looking over the Books To Be Read the other morning, my eyes fell once again on the attractive cover of Georges Perec's <em>"53 Days"</em>, his last book, and I dove straight in. I haven't yet read <em>Life a User's Manual</em> or <em>A Void</em>, and I don't know when I will: they're long and dense, and I rather mistrust their translation into English. Perec is well known to be an Oulipian; his books are written with the celebrated constraints of the Oulipo group; and as a writer I like to read deeply enough to get into the method behind the book while enjoying the content of the book. As the Companion says, once a critic, always a critic. <p>I'm sure there are constraints aplenty in <em>"53 Days"</em>, but I read the book quickly, for pleasure, and didn't notice them at all. Let me explain quickly: constraints include such things as acrostic, palindrome, anagram, and lipogram (which omits a given letter: in the case of <em>A Void</em>, the letter "e"); I'm not going to go further into the technical matter of the subject, which can be explored <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constrained_writing">on Wikipedia</a> or in Daniel Levin BEcker's excellent book <em>Many Subtle Channels: in Praise of Potential Literature</em>, which I <a href="http://cshere.blogspot.com/2012/12/seven-for-andrew.html">wrote about here</a> a number of years ago. <p><em>"53 Days"</em> is incomplete: Perec died before finishing it — a supreme constraint. It was planned as a detective novel in two parts, of which the first, called <em>53 Days</em>, <em>is</em> complete as a very readable first draft in this edition, ably translated by the dependable David Bellos. (Well, <em>nearly</em> complete: the last two of the thirteen chapters are present only as extended notes from various notebooks Perec was keeping.) <p>The second part, <em>Un R Est Un M Qui Se P Le L De La R</em>, exists only as sketches, notes, and memos. Had the book been finished its structure would have recalled Perec's earlier, very successful <em>W or the Memory of Childhood</em>, a book that comes frequently to mind these Trumpian days, and came to mind reading <em>There's a Mystery There</em>, and which I highly recommend. (And here let me add my recommendation for approaching Perec, for those who aren't constrained by my chronological compulsions: <em>Things</em>; <em>A Man Asleep</em>; <em>W or the Memory of Childhood</em>. They're approachable as simple <em>reading</em>, pleasure reading, in spite of all the critical apparatus that's grown up around them, but of course the more deeply one reads, the more pleasure one gets.) <p><em>53 Days</em> without the enclosing quotes, that is the first part not the whole book, is a mystery enclosed within another, exotic in locale (fictional arctic setting, fictional tropical one), with parallel "plots" concerning disappearances and corruptions, elegantly and fascinatingly written. <p>But what of <em>Un R Est Un M Qui Se P Le L De La R</em>&thinsp;? The enigmatic title turns out to be a clue to another mystery, a deeper one; or rather a pair of them: one concerning the characters and plots within the book, the other concerning the book itself and how (and, I suppose, possibly why) it was approached — alas one cannot say "written", it's only sketched and planned, though pretty elaborately. <p>I was particularly satisfied by the book because it involves one of my favorite terrains, the Grande Chartreuse — and, oddly, a minor device is a (apparently marginal) bookshop in Grenoble used as a drop by Resistance fighters, a shop remarkably similar to that in which my correspondant Charles Lunaire found the typescript of Jean Coqt's novel <em>Skagen</em>, which Lunaire is translating and I am publishing. (The fourth section, <em>Modane</em>, will be out by the end of June.) <p>And suddenly, near the end of <em>"53 Days"</em>, a passage that goes straight to the heart of anyone who loves rambling the Alps: in Bellos's translation,<blockquote>This snow-covered waste ground is like an immense blank page where the people we are seeking have inscribed not only their movements and gait, but their secret thoughts too…<br><div align="right">Gaboriau<br><em>Monsieur Leccoq</em> (1868)</div></blockquote>Which sent me immediately to <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8650">Project Gutenberg</a> for the original:<blockquote> <em>Ce terrain vague, couvert de neige, est comme une immense page blanche où les gens que nous recherchons ont écrit, non seulement leurs mouvements et leurs démarches, mais encore leurs secrètes pensées…</em></blockquote> So now I must read Gaboriau, and Stendhal too — I'll never get to <em>Moby-Dick</em> at this rate…http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/05/light-reading-close-reading.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-2229362498346865115Sat, 27 May 2017 19:15:00 +00002017-05-27T12:15:12.389-07:00Richard Diebenkorn<div align="right"><em>Eastside Road, May 27, 2017—<br>Letter to an Italian friend</em></div><table style: float left><tr><td>Matisse/Diebenkorn<br>San Francisco Museum of Modern Art<br>March 17-May 29 2017</td></tr></table> <table><tr><td><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-S6BD5AZK4Mg/WSnPx8rBzqI/AAAAAAAAOz0/wvBn_nP5HgkCa5rLivWkAAkfMDEvMQX-gCLcB/s1600/IMG_5308.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-S6BD5AZK4Mg/WSnPx8rBzqI/AAAAAAAAOz0/wvBn_nP5HgkCa5rLivWkAAkfMDEvMQX-gCLcB/s320/IMG_5308.jpg" width="302" height="320" data-original-width="1511" data-original-height="1600" /></a><br>Richard Diebenkorn: <em>Chabot Valley</em>, 1955<br>19-1/2 x 18-3/4 inches</td></tr></table> <big>W</big><small>E WENT YESTERDAY</small> to see the <small>SFMOMA</small> show of work by Henri Matisse and Richard Diebenkorn, just in time, as it closes May 29. The exhibition is titled “Profound Inspiration: Matisse/Diebenkorn,” a title which seems to me only superficially inspired. What is inspiration? The breathing into a receptor by an external source. There is no doubt of the importance of Matisse to Diebenkorn, who referred to it himself publicly on many occasions; and there are certainly good examples in this show of works which show direct homages on Diebenkorn’s part to specific HM paintings, though in many other cases the connection is, to my eye, less a matter of direct “inspiration” than a developed affinity brought out, if at all, by curatorial statements on wall labels. <p>We took a old friend with us. The exhibition was crowded, but a combination of the timed entry and the fact that many viewers were wearing their headphones helped mitigate the crowd. First of all we jumped the line — someone recognized me for the long-retired art critic I am, said “You’ve paid your dues,” smiled, and waved us past the waiting line into the galleries. There, of course, many viewers waited in front of this painting or that while listening the their headphones, so I followed my usual practice of finding a painting being neglected at the moment and standing directly in front of it, viewing it as long as I wanted, leaning on my cane. <p>One of the key paintings was <em>Chabot Valley</em>, a small landscape from 1955. I’d been advised to pay particular attention to it, and thought I knew it: but of course I didn’t, as it’s still in the Diebenkorn family; I was confusing it with another painting, not in the show, which I see with my mind’s eye but don’t readily find among the various sources at hand. I am almost certain I had seen the painting before, though, hanging in Diebenkorn’s house outside Healdsburg, when I had a conversation with him in, I think, 1992. (RD died of emphysema in Berkeley in March 1993.) <p>I lingered, in the <small>SFMOMA</small> show, in front of <em>Chabot Valley</em>, an extraordinary painting for the success of its complexity and truthfulness in such a small scale — you can see why he would have kept it nearby for the rest of his life, as a sort of touchstone, a painting against which to check work under way. I think it’s likely the success of <em>Chabot Valley</em> developed of its own accord, and this is how: the external reality of the landscape he was painting, including of course its sky, and the example of the paintings by others (not exclusively Matisse by any means), and the painting itself as it developed from his palette and brushstrokes, all simply converged, partly from his conscious decisions, partly from the habits of hand and eye that he’d developed in studio work (including many hours of figure drawing and many others of printmaking), partly by consciously taking advantage of “accidents” presenting themselves in the course of painting. <p>Now Diebenkorn was an extraordinarily intelligent and thoughtful man. I spoke to him twice, once when he had a retrospective at <small>SFMOMA</small> in 1972; again in his Healdsburg home twenty years later. On both occasions his intelligence and thoughtfulness were immediately apparent: he spoke slowly, without ums and ahs, and referred to a wide range of reading, including the “reading” of visual work by other artists, contemporary and historical. I think any approach to his work, painting, drawing, or prints, that doesn’t include a similar approach, can begin to extract the richness of meaning that’s in it. I’m not saying this has to be conscious, or that his work is exclusively for similarly developed intelligences, of course even a viewer who’s only interested in painting-over-the-sofa interior decorating can find a lot to enjoy in an Ocean Park painting (not to mention Matisse. But there’s a lot more there, as Diebenkorn was quick to point out himself in interviews and conversation: <blockquote>“I keep plastering it until it comes around to what I want, in terms of all I know and think about painting now, as well as in terms of the initial observation. One wants to see the artifice of the thing as well as the subject. Reality has to be digested, it has to be transmuted by paint. It has to be given a twist of some kind.” <br><div align="right">(RD, quoted in Nordland, attributed to Paul Mills, <em>Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting</em>, Oakland: Oakland Art Museum, 1957, p. 12)</div></blockquote> The current <small>SFMOMA</small> show includes a few vitrines housing books and periodicals from Diebenkorn’s personal collection, and you can be pretty sure his studio, like most painters’ studios, had reproductions of paintings pinned up here and there, more touchstones; though I believe certain works were burned into his memory and always cropped up someplace. I didn’t buy the Matisse-Diebenkorn catalogue and wasn’t allowed to photograph the wall labels (which annoyed me) and, given the crowds, my back, and our schedule, wasn’t able readily to take notes, but it’s likely this was a point the curator was making in this show. <p>It was probably helpful to me that our friend was with us, and asking intelligent questions from time to time: how should an intelligent and willing but basically untutored and in a sense painterly illiterate person approach these paintings? I talked about edges, the way Diebenkorn often squeezes a composition down into a rectangle slightly smaller than the canvas itself. I talked about palette, the way he finds new uses for colors found in previous paintings. I talked about composition and planes and perspective and vertical-versus-horizontal and recession and all that, without of course going into detail. I talked about the way certain touches reappear from one painting to the next — little flecks of color, little rectangles, little linear shapes (eyeglasses, bra-cups, the club sign from playing cards (heraldry, I remember the wall label had it), schematic faces recalling those of the Russian painter Alexei Jawlensky). <p>I’m fascinated that apparently I do all this quickly and subconsciously when I look at a painting, and it took the conversation with our friend to bring all this out. And on the way home, me sleeping in the back seat, I woke up and said, a propos of nothing, I hate doing that. What, our friend asked. Talking about painting like that: it’s all so glib. I know that’s how you feel, she said. (She was instrumental in getting me onto our local newspaper as a music critic, for a couple of seasons, after I’d left the Oakland <em>Tribune</em>.) Then we both fell silent. I think she disagrees, that she knows the value of journalistic criticism: but to me it’s public one-sided opinionizing too ready to lapse into a kind of authoritarianism. <table><tr><td><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kW4sqVDbHDc/WSnQFCO1KMI/AAAAAAAAOz4/TCZVBqcVpNQZPZEhD9FL3NH3C8iryXKjwCLcB/s1600/IMG_5313.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kW4sqVDbHDc/WSnQFCO1KMI/AAAAAAAAOz4/TCZVBqcVpNQZPZEhD9FL3NH3C8iryXKjwCLcB/s320/IMG_5313.jpg" width="258" height="320" data-original-width="1290" data-original-height="1600" /></a><br>Richard Diebenkorn: <em>Ocean Park No. 54</em>, 1972<br>100 x 81 inches</td></tr></table>Anyhow we worked our way through the galleries, the Diebenkorns mostly but not all paintings I knew either from the flesh, so to speak, or reproductions, the Matisses not, in some cases, and then we stepped into the final gallery, where the Ocean Park paintings were. I stood for a long time in front of No. 54, a favorite of mine, one of the best I think and one in the <small>SFMOMA</small> collection — this is the one with the “Jawlensky” face, or a detail of it, at the lower right corner. As I backed away from it I overheard a tall man with curly white hair talking about it to his companion, trying to explain why he found it the best painting in the show, better than any of the Matisses. Besides, I interjected, somewhat rashly, Diebenkorn’s a better painter. <p>Thank you thank you for saying that, he said, that’s what I’ve been trying to say, it’s really that simple. (It isn’t, of course, it’s just that Diebenkorn is a better painter for me, for my purposes. And what are my purposes? To understand better how, using my eyes, I understand reality.) We had a little conversation and agreed that the Ocean Park series is simply magnificent. Each of the paintings, almost all of them, has in it all the things you want: landscape, figure, abstraction, light, perspective, color, edge, content, reference. Each of them has looked at <em>Chabot Valley</em> and thought about all the issues that early little painting raises (and resolves, you have to concede, on its own terms), and internalizes all those issues and resolves them anew, and leaves the painter’s eye out of the equation; they are completely ego-transcendent. <p>And then I was tired, and we left, and went to Zuni for hamburgers, and home. <p>Then this morning I looked into Gerald Nordland’s book (<em>Richard Diebenkorn</em>: Rizzoli, 1989) and thought about things and decided to write to you. I know you’ve looked into this catalog a lot, more than I have recently I’m sure. I was surprised to find I’d pencilled notes into it, probably when I was thinking of that interview in 1992. A magazine publisher had set up the interview, working through Diebenkorn’s gallery as I recall, overcoming my reluctance to do it. Finally I agreed to talk to Diebenkorn about why neither he nor I wanted to do an interview, to be published in his magazine. I went out to Diebenkorn’s Healdsburg house. He was not strong. I don’t recall whether he had breathing apparatus; I don’t think so. We had a nice conversation, one of those with long silences in which each was thinking of other things, probably Matisse, Chekhov, west coast jazz, the Bay Area school, and so on, each of us knowing what the other found valuable and enriching, and each of us knowing there was neither reason nor point in discussing these things, they were a matter of common knowledge and agreement. <p>It may be (and perhaps it must be) that Matisse's was similarly rich and thoughtful a mentality; I don’t know. Clearly he was more intellectual than was Picasso, but by “intellectual” let’s admit we’re meaning “articulate, verbal”: as I said to our friend, painters like Diebenkorn “read” paintings the way others — she and I, I said — read novels. And the greats — Matisse, Picasso, Diebenkorn — teach us, I think, to read “reality” that way, and landscape, and skies, and arrangements of things on tables, and the figure. <p>In the last analysis I don’t think it was a magnificent show; the curator’s point was made but it is God knows an easy point to make; many of the Matisses (by no means all!) were second-rate paintings for him, and the Diebenkorns were mostly first-rate. We saw a marvelous show in Fort Worth, years ago, pairing Matisse and Picasso, showing their mutual inspiration — no, not inspiration; more like homages to one another, as in Oh: you can do that? Look what I can do with it! It may be, as my Companion suggests, that that exhibition has grown in my memory of it, and that this one will grow similarly. In any case Diebenkorn is a creative force to be grateful for, a transcendent expression of his century, a painter who knew both intuitively and through careful thought and observation the things I was trying to write the other day about space, measure, and markings. http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/05/richard-diebenkorn.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-8338154108438029978Tue, 23 May 2017 20:48:00 +00002017-05-24T16:36:29.720-07:00Space, measure, and markings<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HpEFYrcTbZ4/WSYY0j9dUGI/AAAAAAAAOyM/MzA807ue_vgvOSYoGZ0_cRkbvAsWYB6AACLcB/s1600/IMG_5286.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HpEFYrcTbZ4/WSYY0j9dUGI/AAAAAAAAOyM/MzA807ue_vgvOSYoGZ0_cRkbvAsWYB6AACLcB/s400/IMG_5286.jpg" width="400" height="300" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1200" /></a> <big>I</big>&nbsp;<small> THINK OF</small> space, measure, marks, and accent. Why? Partly because I live in this landscape: except when traveling, it is my everyday context. The lineaments and proportions of ridgeline, gradients, swales and hillocks; and the markings of windrows of cut grass, of cypresses and grapevines, mold and reinforce the way I see. And for that reason, perhaps, partly because that is how I seem to respond to what I read and hear. The other night, for example, we went to a production of an adaptation of Pierre Corneille’s <em>Cinna</em>. I don’t know Corneille well, that’s for sure; of his thirty-odd plays I think I’ve only seen <em>L’Illusion comique</em>, in an adaptation by Tony Kushner. (That was at the Pasadena company A Noise Within, which I support because it mounts productions of French repertory. Five years ago! I wrote about it <a href="http://cshere.blogspot.com/2012/04/three-plays-at-noise-within.html">here</a>.) <p>I think you could refer to Corneille's plays as examples of French baroque, along with those of Jean Racine. When through with my summertime reading agenda I must turn to those two: as they pivot from the baroque toward Romanticism, reading them should nicely accompany the autumnal season. <p>I wanted to attend this production chiefly because it was accompanied by Lou Harrison's incidental music, composed in the late 1950s, when he too was thinking about the baroque, and had definitively left New York, and modernism, for a near-rural life in Aptos, California. I remember visiting him there in his cabin and seeing and hearing the tack-piano for which he scored <em>Cinna</em>, an upright piano with ordinary metal thumbtacks pushed into the hammer-felts, producing a sound reminiscent of the grand harpsichords on which Rameau's and Couperin's music is so glorious. <p>The piano was tuned in just intonation, based on today's concert "G," with, I think, an eleven-limit, meaning it was faithful to the acoustical overtone series up to the eleventh partial. Somewhere I have a recording of Lou playing one of the intermezzi of his <em>Cinna</em> on this instrument, and for a long time I thought that was all there was to it, three or four minutes of remarkably spacious animation, decorative, supple, sweet, and strong, like so much of Lou's music, and <em>measured</em>, like the sound of the narration at the opening of the Alan Resnais film <em>Last Year at Marienbad</em>, also a favorite of mine. <p>Corneille's <em>Cinna</em> is in the requisite five acts, respecting the classical unities of time and location, and Lou (I knew him well enough that it feels unnatural to refer to him in any other way) wrote in fact five pieces, each, I feel sure, intended as a prelude to the following act. But last week's production was an adaptation, in English, boiled down to about forty minutes, read by its adapter Larry Reed, who modified his voice slightly to distinguish the major characters. (Each of the five acts, presented without intermission, was preceded by its opening lines in the original French, a marvelously evocative way to mark off the dramatic structure.) <p>The "actors" were shadow-puppets — wire representations of faces, in profile, of those principles (Octavius Caesar Augustus, Livia, Cinna, Maximus, Emilia, and the lesser roles Fulvia, Evander, and Euphorbus), manipulated behind a scrim. Lou, I think, would have approved this; it recalls his later opera <em>Young Caesar</em>, originally intended for large-scale puppets; and somehow it reveals the subconscious affinity of the baroque, and especially I think the French baroque, with certain Asian theater. <p>Linda Burman-Hall played the tack piano, and gave a little talk before the performance, explaining the instrument and suggesting that the music was intended to be descriptive of the characters in the play. This could be, but I'm not so sure. I think Lou was primarily an abstractionist, and that his music is descriptive of qualities, not personalities, though perhaps this is what Burman-Hall meant. In any case she played splendidly. (Her recording of the music can be bought online at the inevitable Amazon.) <hr> <big>W</big><small>HAT APPEALS TO ME</small> in <em>Cinna</em> is its <em>measure</em>. The play is about a conspiracy to assassinate Caesar, its discovery, and his forgiveness of the plotters who have proven their sincere remorse. As ever-helpful <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinna_(play)">Wikipedia writes</a>, "Corneille addresses the question of clemency and advocates an end to spiraling vengeance. His response is apologetic towards absolute power." He wrote, after all, largely with the indulgence of Louis XIV, during a time when social stability, if it were to be achieved, would depend on a stable structure itself dependent on a sustainable system of unequal social orders: Emperor or King, lesser nobles, clerics, merchants, peasants. <p>The social structure collapsed under the weight it built up at the top, through greed and the insistence on <em>gloire</em>, that majestic splendor which illuminates and radiates from absolute power, justifying it to the lower orders. In the mid-17th century France may have succeeded, for a few years, in maintaining the equilibrium; a century later of course it was crumbling toward the Bastille. (I wonder how all this will look a century hence.) <p>Lou's music itself is technically what is called "unmeasured," as I believe. (I haven't seen the score.) That's to say, it isn't barred off into regularly repeating "measures" of equal lengths, based on regular beats proceeding at a steady pace. This has always seemed a misleading terminology to me: the measure of the resulting music is felt by the performer, and expressed to the listener, in some other way than by the motor rhythms common to the music we mostly have in our consciousness (and even below that), whether it's "classical" concert music or commercial entertainment music. <p>Lou and his friend John Cage — they worked together for years — were greatly interested in this quality, which perhaps had something to do with the parallel historical development of abstraction in the visual arts. (And, to an extent, the literary ones: Gertrude Stein was the pioneer here, though I think perhaps even Proust is best read with <em>measure</em> in mind, more than narration.) <p>Their friend Virgil Thomson, the composer and critic of the New York <em>Herald Tribune</em> (where he hired Lou and John to turn in occasional concert reviews, always informative and entertaining), said that there were two kinds of (European-tradition) music, that based on song, which is vocal and strophic, and that based on dance, which is pedal and repetitive. Then came the 19th century and Romanticism and a third type, which he called spasmic, based on the movements of internal organs of one kind or another, mostly one in particular. <p>It's a cute summary and a useful one, but one result was the determination, by John and Lou, that it was high time for another approach to music, one that renders the listener tranquil — that is, in a non-self-absorbed state — and receptive to divine influences. And it's thence, I think, grows the concept of measureless music, music that requires the suspension of regular markings and events. Lou turned to the baroque — he'd earlier been much interested in early 18th-century Spanish music as known in the California missions — and John turned to purposeless abstraction reliant on chance procedures. <p>Of the historical events and processes I've known over the last sixty years and more I regret most, perhaps, the institutional neglect and contempt toward the procedures of the mid-20th-century avant garde. I lack John Cage's serenity in the face of that monumental social failure, and I have misgivings about Lou's apparent evasion, his withdrawal into gamelan. Apparent, I say, because I am certain within himself this was a perfectly successful adjustment to his position: but it is perhaps wrongly interpreted as an acceptance of and adaptive use of that quintessentially social and performative music, where I believe it was a recognition of a quality too easily unnoticed by the listener and even the performer: the spatial, long-measured structure enveloping the incessant (and to me distracting) motor-element of the beats. <p>Maybe it’s just the feeble complaint of an old man, but it seems to me we mostly lack an awareness of scale, an understanding of spaciousness, an appreciation of the long view, the big field. As societies and as individuals we lose ourselves in incessant nervous activity: we fidget. Of course fewer and fewer of us live among hills like mine; most of us are indoors most of the time, and the view out the window, when there is one, is likely to be the confining grids of rectilinear buildings across the straight and busy streets. John enjoyed it, serenely busy in his spare rooms above the noisy West Side. Virgil, that utterly urban francophile, seemed to take it for granted, basking in <em>gloire</em>.I can’t take it for long; it drives me nuts, as it did Lou. http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/05/space-measure-and-markings.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-5091412388481546817Fri, 12 May 2017 00:06:00 +00002017-05-11T17:10:29.446-07:00Sixes and tens for Lindsey on our anniversary <table><tr><td><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ohYF0rkYV30/WRT7fxWUe3I/AAAAAAAAOug/6Gk237TiY8kmEsJBuCTgBzvPCigs2GTfwCLcB/s1600/IMG_5187.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ohYF0rkYV30/WRT7fxWUe3I/AAAAAAAAOug/6Gk237TiY8kmEsJBuCTgBzvPCigs2GTfwCLcB/s400/IMG_5187.jpg" width="400" height="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td><small><em>Lindsey at the Erickson Gallery, Healdsburg</em></small></td></tr></table><strong>Sixes and tens for Lindsey on our anniversary<br><br><br> </strong><small><em>Grow old along with me! <br>The best is yet to be, <br>The last of life, for which the first was made… </em><br><br>— Robert Browning: “Rabbi Ben Ezra”</small>* <br><br> We <em>are</em> the best: I mean<br>we have the best, the best that we can have.<br>Just now it’s difficult,<br>but it’s been a hell of a ride, you know,<br>asking for more at this point amounts to<br>greediness — or folly. <br><br>After those rainy months<br>there’s a hot time ahead;<br>let’s make the best of it right now and here.<br>Our long parallel lives<br>converge in the reward<br>of this endless family around us <br><br>and the work that we’ve done — <br>whether or not anyone not yet born<br>knows or cares about it<br>at least it has kept us<br>from tearing at one another’s throats, all<br>these full and pleasant years.<br><br> Calm times and turbulence,<br>it all comes down to that:<br>anger, lust, passion, long silent moments,<br>love is using the other to make sense<br>of what can have meaning<br>but doesn’t, otherwise.<br><br> That’s just how I see it.<br>I can have no idea<br>what <em>you</em> make of love, marriage, life and death.<br>There never was any alternative.<br>Now, contemplation is<br>about all I can give — <br><br> Before too long, I think,<br>one or another of us, maybe both,<br>takes that walk over the ridge, just to see<br>what it’s like over there.<br>Our selves will just dissolve,<br>We know, like long marriage, <br>The possibilities are endless now.<br><br> <em>— Healdsburg, May 11, 2017 </em> <br><br>*<small>The first half of the first of 32 stanzas and by far the most memorable. I recall my mother quoting them, often, for some reason, when I was still just a kid, who knows why. I think about them now on my 60th wedding anniversary.)</small>http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/05/sixes-and-tens-for-lindsey-on-our.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-2864069081759651334Sun, 07 May 2017 22:35:00 +00002017-05-07T15:35:49.279-07:00Approaching Africa<div align="right"><em>Eastside Road, May 7, 2017—</em></div> <table align="left" ><tr><td><small>Ilja Leonardo Pfeijffer: <em>La Superba</em><br>&nbsp;&nbsp;(tr. Michele Hutchison) <br>Albert Camus: <em>L'Etranger</em> <br>Kamel Daoud: <br>&nbsp;&nbsp;<em>The Meursault Investigation</em><br>&nbsp;&nbsp;(tr. John Cullen)</small></td></tr></table><big>M</big><small>Y WORLD HAS SUDDENLY</small> and necessarily grown considerably larger by the introduction into the family of a fine man born and brought to maturity in Algeria, of all places. That is what happens when a beautiful and intelligent girl spends a year abroad, in Italy; and then you take her for a month to Venice; and then she decides to go to college in Rome. International Relations! a course of study; then a prescription. <p>I'm not complaining: her betrothed is an excellent man, a journalist and a translator; as a writer myself I can forgive his being an editor. The wedding is set for — well, as soon as our government allows him a visa: if not this year in this country, then I would bet in Italy, whose view of immigration, troubled as it is, is officially more generous than that of our present administration. <p>Recently, then, my reading has gravitated toward the question of African emigration to Europe. Thank Zeus Xenios for our extended (though in truth mostly European) family! Tom was visiting here three months ago from Netherlands, and told me I <em>had</em> to read Pfeijffer's novel <em>La Superba</em>, not only was it all the rage in the author's native Netherlands, not only was it truly a good read, but it was a description, as well, of the very city we'd visited with Tom's parents only a few months ago, Genoa, "La Superba," a city we'd long wanted to become familiar with. <p>Well, we didn't become familiars, goes without saying; Genoa turns out to be a historical and social complexity rivalling Venice, Naples, and Palermo. Which is one of the things <em>La Superba</em> is "about." Pfeijffer is apparently an expatriate there, having left a small country grown too familiar and too internationalized-thus-boring to satisfy his authorial needs. You can't tell whether his novel <em>is</em> a novel; it's clearly part memoir; he weaves his authorial presence into and out of the book in that manner, troubling to many of us elderly readers, that erases the distinction — to me it was always a false one — between fiction and non-fiction. <p>(The proof of the falsity of the distinction: there's no better word for the supposed antithesis of "fiction" than "non-fiction.") <p>I was put off, at first, elderly and prudish as I am, by much of the language and imagery in <em>La Superba</em>, which opens with the narrator's discovery of a human leg and the quick attachment he develops to it — not physical, not truly fetishistic, but certainly erotic in an intellectual way. Quickly, though, the narrative reaches out into those mysterious Genovese streets and piazzas ranging up the hill behind the waterfront, and a populace, unseen by day and largely even at night by a casual tourist, is convincingly revealed, a populace of drifters, expats, barmen, transvestites, and immigrants. <p>The writing is very beautiful even though continuously vernacular. (I read the book in English, of course; Hutchison's translation seems to me effortless.) Pfeijffer has been compared to Calvino, and his book to Dante's <em>Inferno</em>; but the book made me think also of narrative cartoons. It's very visual, and would make a lovely film if handled by, say, the people who made <em>Les triplettes de Belleville</em>. Structurally it's broken into three big, roughly equal-size chapters, divided by two shorter interludes. <p>One of these is the harrowing and completely persuasive, hence plausible accounts of one refugee's escape from his native Senegal to his eventual place in Genova. The parallel with refugees from Central America coming here is inescapable to an American reader, I think. <p>Pfeijffer is himself — or his narrator is; hard to tell the extent to which they're identical — an immigrant, though a legal one, given the Schenken agreement within the European Union. But one of the subtexts here is: is <em>any</em> immigration truly "legal"? Or, perhaps, isn't <em>all</em> emigration legal, since ours is a wandering species, and all Europeans are ultimately descended from Africans? <p>Beyond the moral issue of migration, of course, or rather this side of it, there's the economic issue. How are these people to make a living? Tom, the Netherlander who recommended the book to me, is an economist by profession, specializing in entrepreneurship: he must have enjoyed this layer of <em>La Superba</em>. They make a living, "these people," by selling roses to diners in restaurants, or themselves to tourists of a certain sort (or to one another), or occasionally by cadging a spare coin or two. Pfeijffer befriends a couple of "these people" enough to get their stories, sharing café tables with them, ultimately becoming one of them — this is perhaps where the book becomes fiction — in his quest for the most beautiful girl in Genoa. <p>What you do not get, in reading this superb novel, is a sense of the locals, the Genovese, of Italians in general — they keep off these streets and piazzas. In Pfeijffer's world one's an immigrant, a tourist, or else part of the unseen normality that seems to have quite vanished.<hr> <em>La Superba</em> is completely successful novel/journalism on many levels: a page-turner of a narrative, a fragrant evocation of place, a provocative query into overwhelming social and economic problems at the beginning of the 21st century, a statement of language and narrative structure perfectly at home with its antecedents (Joyce, Calvino, Swift). <p><em>The Meursault Investigation</em> is none of those things. Its premise is fascinating: an account of the narrative central to Camus's <em>L'Etranger</em> from the point of view of "the Arab," told by a much younger brother of the man Camus's hero-antihero Meusault fatally shoots in his own novel. I was curious to read <em>The Meursault Investigation</em>, hoping it would give me some insight into the mentality of a people released from colonialism only to be hounded by a return to the authoritarianism of the ancient tradition European colonialism had worked so hard to erase. <p>I knew, though, that it would be useless to tackle <em>The Meursault Investigation</em> without having Camus fresh in mind. I'm embarrassed to admit I'd never read <em>L'Etranger</em>. I attempted it, sixty years ago and more, but my French was not up to it: and what I could understand, in the opening pages, was eclipsed buy the brittle brilliance of Camus's style. <p>But I downloaded a French-language edition of the book — its cover curiously giving the title as "L'Estranger" — and had at it, and discovered the book is so compellingly written, in such clear, limpid French, that with the useful help e-book reading offers in terms of glossing unknown words the story at least, and the profound moral and philosophical questions the story raises, were perfectly clear. Camus writes with Hemingway's pen, but Dostoevsky's soul and brain. <p>His book is straightforward: Meursault, a young single <em>pied-noir</em> (French ethnically born in France-colonized Algeria), bored with a mediocre life, falls into dubious company, allows himself out of boredom and inertia to pledge his honor to an act of revenge, kills an unnamed young Algerian who has pulled a knife on him (true enough: in an apparently unthreatening gesture), is imprisoned, tried, and sentenced. <p>Behind this narrative the book is "about" the equivalence of socially normal and heinous behavior given a colonialist context depending on social stratification, compounded by relentless heat, perhaps engendered by failed domestic life (the father is mysteriously absent, the mother inert), and not at all relieved by a religion whose basic assumptions are irrelevant. <p>Meursault's existential quandary cannot be resolved, which has led many to question the morality of Camus's book. His outlook reminds me of Wittgenstein's dictum: Of what we cannot know, of that we should not speak. But Chekhov isn't far away; you can imagine Meursault, if Russian, then Treplyov. But of course <em>L'Etranger</em> is French: rational, objective, phenomenological, it's well within a trajectory of literature more connected to Flaubert or Francis Ponge or the George Perec of <em>Les Choses</em> than it is to Dante or Dostoevsky.<hr> Which brings me finally to <em>The Meursault Investigation</em>, a first novel significant for its place within post-novelistic literature and its introduction of a North African voice to its European audience. Alas, I could not get hold of a copy in French, but John Cullen's translation seems perfectly satisfactory; you can't think the prose style and the book's architecture depends on an essentially untranslatable linguistic style. <p>I had hoped Daoud would be using his novel to state an "Arab" view of Meursault's existential quandary, either refuting it thanks to some intellectual instrumentality foreign to the western European mentality or (perhaps more satisfyingly) reinforcing it through parallels or resonances resting on a Moslem sensibility. But this is not Daoud's intention. <p>Instead he focusses on the least interesting aspect of Camus's profound book: its top layer, its straightforward narrative of objectively verifiable details of plot and character. He gives us a counter-<em>L'Etranger</em>, told by the much younger brother of Meursault's nameless victim, resting on a similarly compromised relationship with his <em>maman</em>, punctuated by a similar <em>acte gratuite</em> whose philosophical usefulness is damaged by its undoubted political motivation. <p>Like <em>L'Etranger</em>, <em>The Meursault Investigation</em> is short and quickly read; unlike Camus, Daoud takes some time to hit his stride in the book. Through his narrator he admits he lacks the magical, precise evocation Camus is so famous for. (I seem to remember he blames this problem partly on the French language, native to Camus, learned, specifically in order to read <em>L'Etranger</em>, by Daoud's narrator.) <p>What is most fascinating about <em>The Meursault Investigation</em> is what it says about our present literary and political moment, so different from that of Camus. Daoud's book is materialistic, narrative (when it finally gets under way), filmic, and specific because bound to unchangeable injustices in the colonialistic past, where Camus's is meditative, evocative, theatrical, and — I think — universal in its implications. It's too bad, I suppose, to fault the new book for not having the older one's virtues; but the comparison is ultimately the point of <em>The Meursault Investigation</em>. I'm glad I read it, and I recommend it (though not without a recent reading of <em>L'Etranger</em> in mind); but it does not expand this reader's mind to further understanding of that of the postcolonial African. Maybe that's the point. http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/05/approaching-africa.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-1829601592836839924Sun, 30 Apr 2017 19:39:00 +00002017-04-30T12:39:07.342-07:00Rome, 14: The controllers of destiny<div align="right"><em>Eastside Road, April 30, 2017—</em></div> <big>T</big><small>ESTACCIO IS A QUARTER</small> of Rome across the river from Trastevere and south of the Aventine hill, a quarter that always makes me think of the San Salvatario quarter in Torino because unlike every other quarter of the old city it is laid out on a grid. (I don’t include Prati among the old city; I don’t know why; it may be that it’s just as old as Testaccio. <p>Testaccio is the belly of Rome. It used to harbor the slaughterhouses, and continues to house its share of good restaurants often featuring that subspecialty of Roman cuisine that is founded on meat, and more specifically on offal. Many of us do not often eat offal, of course, or find it not to our liking — unattractive and off-putting. I like quadruped liver as much as anyone, and never pass up a chance at <em>fegato Veneziano</em> when in Venice, and I’ve managed lamb hearts, which were featured, oddly I think, one Mother’s Day at Chez Panisse; but I’m one of those who is made uneasy at the thought of brains, or tripe, or kidneys, or various other things. Perhaps it’s because I spent time as a child on a farm where we butchered our own animals, and I saw these items as they were removed from the carcass — and, thanks I suppose to my mother’s fastidiousness, thrown to the dogs. <p>I have friends and very good ones who choose not to eat meat, I think often for the same principle that led me not to eat at all on Tuesdays — to acknowledge that our lives depend on the deaths of other organisms. (Well, we do have toast and coffee on Tuesday mornings, and tea and nuts in the evening.) I find it enchanting, I think the word not too strong, that the Protestant Cemetery and Cestius’s memorial pyramid are on the edge of Testaccio, that carnivorous quarter, and that Monte Testaccio is too, the biggest of Rome’s garbage heaps, a pile of broken pots half a mile round and over one hundred feet high. <p>The pots were mostly from Spain, and carried olive oil. (Some were from North Africa.) Nearly all commodities were shipped in terra cotta jars in those days; they were the smaller versions of today’s containers, with a capacity of twenty gallons or so. Wheat and wine were shipped in them, and when their jars were no longer useful they were broken up to be used as landfill or in the production of concrete. <p>These olive-oil jars, though, were too oily for such use, and about the time the early Christians were or were not being persecuted, these jars were stacked up in terraces, whole ones making the walls to hold back shards carefully laid behind. So Imperial Rome, like the contemporary “developed” world, depended on the importation of oil, and on the conquest and administration of such lands as Iberia and North Africa to supply it. <em>Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose</em>. <p>Of the restaurants in present-day Testaccio we like Perilli: but in this month in Rome we did not visit any restaurant in the quarter, though we did have delicious sandwiches at a counter in the oddly new open-air market at the edge of the Monte. We often rode along the edge of Testaccio, though, on the number 3 tram, which takes us out the Via Marmorata, its northern boundary, as far as the Pyramid, before turning north for the delightful ride over a shoulder of the Aventine and an always impressive sighting of the Colosseum. So Testaccio, and its reminder of the persistence of daily life across centuries of human history, was often on my mind. <p>That pile of broken jars is a testament to civic engineering and design; someone had the idea, made the drawings, did the surveying, organized the slaves and donkeys. Ditto the planning for the layout of olive groves in what we now know as Libya, Tunisia, and Andalusia. Ditto, a few centuries later, the organization of the books of the Bible, the development of the narratives and iconography of the saints, the political structure of the evolving Christian church. What I want to know is: what is the force that transcends individuals and individual lifetimes to create and animate these social movements? I know my body is host to perhaps three bacteria for each of my perhaps forty trillion human cells, and that they all have their individual lives, no doubt with as much meaning and importance to them, to the extent of their awareness, as mine as to me: is this an analogy of the zoology of the Roman Empire, or the Catholic Church, or <small>NATO</small>? <p>Belief, faith, knowledge : I began this month’s musings planning to contemplate my feelings about religion: past and permanence, decay and defiance, self and society, faith and belief, fact and facticity, life and death. Maladjustment of my own cells has made me more than normally aware of mortality. And what have the trams and ruins of Rome brought me to contemplate? Cats and garbage heaps on which grain had taken root over the years. Gardens and <em>palazzi</em> ; conversations with strangers; public behavior; the embrace of family; a toy boat; a pile of broken pots. The events and detritus of everyday life, in short. Nothing special, but constant reminders that there are things we see and so believe we know, transactions we share and so know we feel, concepts (and constructs) we hear or read about and so strive to understand. And I keep coming back to Montaigne: <em>Que sais-je</em>, What do I know? <p>In an attempt to understand Algeria from an Algerian point of view — or, rather, in preparing the attempt — on getting home from Rome, four days ago, I read Albert Camus’s <em>L’Etranger</em>. High time. I’d attempted it years ago, probably more than sixty, when my French was not up to it, and its reputation as philosophy was daunting, and I was mesmerized by the chiseled beauty of its prose, blinded, you might say, as Meursault is by the Algerian sun. <p>I may write about my reading of it here, later on, after I’ve read Kamel Daoud’s <em>Meursault, contre-enquête</em>, the recent re-telling (that word’s not quite right) of Camus’s novel from the point of view of the brother of the man Camus’s central character kills — for which he goes to the guillotine. (It maddens me that I cannot buy an e-book of <em>Meursault, contre-enquête</em> except in translation: I read the Camus in that form, very useful for its enabling of instant definition of words one’s not sure about.) I think Daoud’s book probably minimizes Camus’s, making of it a political affair centered on colonialism. One of my points in these last sixteen thousand words is that all human activity is colonialism in one form or another; even the malignant cells in one’s body are colonialists; even the refugees from Africa to Rome, or to Ilja Pfeijffer’s Genova (see <em>La Superba</em> ), are reverse colonizers, you see their colonies in European countries and cities everywhere, it’s that that animates the rejection of immigration by the Right, here and abroad. I was struck by this passage, late in <em>L’Etranger</em> : <blockquote><em>Dans le fond, je n’ignorais pas que mourir à trente ans ou à soixante-dix ans importe peu puisque, naturellement, dans les deux cas, d’autres hommes et d’autres femmes vivront, et cela pendant des milliers d’années. Rien n’était plus clair, en somme.</em> (Ultimately, I wasn’t unaware that whether to die at thirty or at seventy matters little since, naturally, in either case, other men and women live on, and that’s been going on for thousands of years. Nothing clearer, in fact.) </blockquote>That’s my translation, and it’s quick and literal, and fails, I know, in the last two words, which brings me back, <em>en somme</em>, to “fact” and facticity. Meursaults’s clearly stated position on this — he’s the central intelligence, the “hero” (some say “anti-hero” of Camus’s novel, I should have said before — is that it’s a question that doesn’t interest him: which brings the whole thing down to the relationship of Self to Externality. I suppose that’s been my dilemma. <p>I believe our destiny is death, and I think the observable facts bear me out. Others have other ideas about this, but they require various elaborate constructs that don’t interest me. I’m sorry, a little, that I suggested, with the title above, that there might be some Controller of this destiny: I think it’s a matter beyond control, too complex in its numbers and its turbulence to be controlled by any demonstrable agent. The meaning of life? Meursault: <blockquote><em>les plus pauvres et les plus tenaces de mes joies : des odeurs d’été, le quartier que j’aimais, un certain ciel du soir, le rire et les robes de Marie.</em><p>(the poorest and most tenacious of my pleasures: the scents of summer, the quarter that I loved, a certain evening sky, Marie’s laughter and her dresses.)</blockquote>http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/04/rome-14-controllers-of-destiny.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-5375744584476027634Wed, 26 Apr 2017 11:49:00 +00002017-04-26T04:49:35.997-07:00Rome, 13: The toy boat<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cuSKEGHgG2s/WQCJOaMIrsI/AAAAAAAAOqQ/TDvhLRs1GQcA2P3BU2_0kCF7DpetbZBogCLcB/s1600/IMG_5116.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cuSKEGHgG2s/WQCJOaMIrsI/AAAAAAAAOqQ/TDvhLRs1GQcA2P3BU2_0kCF7DpetbZBogCLcB/s320/IMG_5116.jpg" width="320" height="240" /></a></div><div align="right"><em> Via Damaso Cerquetti, April 26, 2017—</em></div>Via Damaso Cerquetti, Rome, April 25, 2017— <big>P</big><small>ROPRIETY AND THE APPROPRIATE</small> pace of intended decay-repair-replacement-and-ultimate-concession of Self, too. I arrived here three weeks ago, weak and unwell and out of sorts, intending to contemplate my feelings about religion: past and permanence, decay and defiance, self and society, faith and belief, fact and facticity, life and death. <p>The other day, strolling through the Pamphilj garden, we stopped to watch a grandfather (one assumes) winding up the screw on a home-made boat he’d made (one further assumes) for his little grandson. The boat was cobbled together out of scraps of wood: a slab whittled to a point at the bow, some kind of lattice-work set on the stern, a couple of blocks for the cabin. The screw was four oversize blades snipped out of an olive-oil can, I imagine; it was driven by a rubber band, the other end hooked over a bent nail under the bow. <p>The little boy stood by patiently while the old man slowly and methodically wound the blades. When the rubber band was tightly wound, holding the blades lest they turn too soon, he put the boat in the pool of the fountain. Was it the Fountain of Venus? I think so. The boat powered away a meter or so, then drifted to a stop; the little boy pulled it to him with a string that had been attached with forethought to the prow. The entire performance was carried on in silent concentration. Perhaps this was the boat’s maiden voyage. Neither of the actors showed any emotion at the proceedings. I might have been disappointed, as either grandfather or little boy, with the apparent failure — the word’s too strong — of the voyage. They seemed completely untroubled. The boat seemed to be a third actor, with power and flaws of its own. I think in its pathos, in its ingenuity and enterprise, and in its care for symbolic representation of the parts of a real ship — a tugboat, say — the little boat was a work of art. <p>Grandfather knew this, and little boy knew this. The boat was a transaction between them; its performance a loving dance of entropy warning both, no doubt without their conscious awareness, of the running down of things, but also the optimism of the making of things. And then simply physically, and to the eye, the little boat made me think, as so much does, of the painters Gordon Cook and Philip Guston, whose view of — or, some would say, interpretations of — external reality are so individual, so clearly charged with deeply known meaning which can only be represented, realistically, as unknowable by anyone else. The things other people make, whether physical objects like toy boats or paintings or fugitive things like songs and dances, if they have any significance at all, are full of meaning to the people who make them, aware of it or not, but rarely the same meaning to us, even if we think we know much of the history or tradition behind them. So a toy boat in its pathos and its physicality brings me closer, in contemplation, to a Mozart piano concerto. <p>What does grandfather know? What does he believe, in what does he have faith? To what extent does he want this little boy to share any of this? I ask this because, after all, I’ve been here with fourteen-year-old, hardly a little boy, a boy wide-eyed and fiercely observant most of the time on this first trip to Europe, a boy still to young to appreciate the stronf flavors of anchovies (think of the sea, his ten-year-older cousin wisely says), a boy caught, unknowingly I think, in the sadness of the farewell to childhood. <p>I stroll and catch the random observation and dwell on it at absurd length and, if I’m not too lazy, write about it at even more ridiculous length, in order to find out what I know, what I believe, whether I have any faith. On the way to this of course I sometimes talk; each day seems to have its focus. <p>Yesterday, for example, it was units of measurement, begun with a discussion about the metric system, the paucity of hecto- given the frequency of centi-, the way the French determined the length of the meter with their straight line from Normandy, I think it was, to Barcelona; and from there to the unit of measurement of dogs (a wire-haired terrier equals six, possibly eight chihuahuas), of trams and buses, of waits for trams and buses. <p>Always, apparently, contemplations of turbulence: You’re obsessed with Tahiti and turbulence, he observes, though I’m not aware of having spoken more than once, and that just now, about Polynesia. The toy boat brought Turbulence to mind, of course, but not Tahiti; so he must be wrong about obsession. Yet this observation of his, to him, is an observation of fact, whereas I think of it only as a mistaken impression. The mistaken impression of a grandfather’s interests is less eventful than the erroneous interpretation of the course of history. I’ve taken some care not to discuss, with him, the perhaps deliberate and certainly tireless attribution, by Christians, of their willful destruction by the early Roman empire, and I’ve certainly not gone into the symbology of those innocent lambs in church facades and frescos. (This must already have been the fruit of urbanization: no one involved in the actual husbandry of sheep would think of them as symbols of innocence and purity.) <p>The facts of Rome are the ruins of its past, the turbulence of what Gertrude Stein would call its continuous present, the uncertainty of its future. These are facts to me and I believe I know them. I infer from their evidence motivation and futility on the part of Roman actors: emperors and popes, gardeners and stonecutters, poets and architects. I believe I’m often right about that, too, though I can’t give you any tangible proof. I think, and some will find this sad, which I’ll dismiss as sentimentality, that I lack faith. Faith seems to me to be allegiance to a concept denied by every present evidence. I think it wrong to insist on it, and certainly wrong to insist on others accepting ours, if we have any. <p>I believe in Beauty, generosity and gratitude, and the ineffable love of family, and I’m grateful to our nature that those beliefs seem to be built in to the human sensibility. I don’t see any reason to strive for more, or to listen to anyone arguing a moral position that requires more.http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/04/rome-13-toy-boat.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-936322904214047276Tue, 25 Apr 2017 09:58:00 +00002017-04-25T02:58:32.703-07:00Rome, 12: Parva. sed apta mihi<table align="left"><tr><td><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qt7lnIBug04/WP8cc7U9BJI/AAAAAAAAOpo/iTt-dBXNkTg5dSzqIqgylcqQGydLI_3gACLcB/s1600/IMG_5104.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qt7lnIBug04/WP8cc7U9BJI/AAAAAAAAOpo/iTt-dBXNkTg5dSzqIqgylcqQGydLI_3gACLcB/s320/IMG_5104.jpg" width="240" height="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td><small><em>In the Coppedè</em></small></td></tr></table> <div align="right"><em> Via Damaso Cerquetti, April 25, 2017—</em></div> <big>O</big><small>N THE OTHER HAND</small>, if you <em>are</em> going to build palaces, why not build them with taste and thoughtfulness? <p>The Italian word for "apartment house" or "apartment building" is, amusingly I think, <em>palazzo</em>: we have been occupying a palace of our own these last three weeks. I've described it and its environs and won't repeat here, other than to note that for the most part these palazzi, built within the last fifty years, are handsome in a plain way: internally for their ease of maintenance and care for light and silence; outside for their uniformity, relieved by their siting on curved streets, or straight but short ones, and, again, their openness to light and sky. <p>Yesterday, though, we strolled through a part of town I particularly like to show new visitors to Rome, the Coppedé district. Done only a little less successfully this quarter might be annoying, little more than Hollywood stage-set. But the architectural detail, the scale, the siting, the play among styles, shapes, and sizes, and the landscaping — all this makes a splendid example of comfortable, tasteful, bourgeois communal residence. <p>You take the tram to the piazza Buenos Aires, either the number 19 from the Piazza Risorgimento, near the Vatican, or the tram 3 from Trastevere. At the Piazza you'll find <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Maria_Addolorata_a_piazza_Buenos_Aires">Santa Maria Addolorata</a>, a remarkable church built between 1910 and 1930 in a fanciful, part historicist and part modern style that foretells the pleasures to come in the Coppedé district beyond. You're attracted to the church first for its siting: it's set at a forty-five degree angle to the Viale Regina Margherita, between its sober yet pleasing bell-tower and a cluster of trees. <p>The facade is decorated with a truly beautiful mosaic in gold and blue, responding to the one (just now undergoing restoration, so unfortunately behind veiling) so many miles away across the Tiber on Santa Maria di Trastevere. If you know the two churches you can almost see and hear them conversing about Byzantine mosaicists, sheep, and faith, as if the bustle of the Via Veneto and the Spanish Steps were utterly inconsequential. I supposer it's politically incorrect, in art-history terms, to equate the two mosaics, but I'll set them side by side anyway. Maybe art critics shook their heads at the Byzantine artists when they were working in Trastevere, finding their work garish and modern and not at all appropriate let alone to their taste. <table align="right"><tr><td><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Z9SGH-c7pj8/WP8ck2IfSxI/AAAAAAAAOps/E88ycP-AU_QqiGfNR1aqq_5OHfXa0tvgACLcB/s1600/1920px-Trieste_-_Santa_Maria_Addolorata_a_piazza_Buenos_Aires_5.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Z9SGH-c7pj8/WP8ck2IfSxI/AAAAAAAAOps/E88ycP-AU_QqiGfNR1aqq_5OHfXa0tvgACLcB/s320/1920px-Trieste_-_Santa_Maria_Addolorata_a_piazza_Buenos_Aires_5.jpg" width="320" height="240" /></a></td></tr><tr><td><small><em>Santa Maria Addolorata: facade</em></small></td></tr></table><p>For all the drama and exuberant color of this mosaic there's something domestic and modest about the building itself. It was constructed by the Argentine community in Rome (hence the Piazza Buenos Aires, and perhaps hence the delay in its completion, for financial reasons), and — perhaps only because one knows this — the architectural style seems to have something modified-Iberian about it. Inside, though, historicism takes over: there are nods to the early style of San Giorgio in Velabro. <p>The baldacchino is neoclassical, reminiscent of Greek temples, supported on granite columns, but behind it a striking mosaic in the apse portrays the Deposition beneath a cross whose curved arms, following the curve of the wall, seem ready to embrace the viewer. And an even more striking mosaic of Mary in her glory, at a side chapel, is nearly blinding in its use of gold: Salvador Dali would have been envious in the way this depiction seems to translate Mary into pure light and energy. <p>Walk from the church up the Via Tagliamento a short block to come to a monumental gate formed by fantastic buildings arching to one another across the Via Dora (Hello there, Piemonte!), and you enter the magic world of Coppedè. Ahead is an enormous fountain clearly thinking of the Fountain of the Rivers in the Piazza Navona. It's clearly temporary; no one will ever steal its statues to put in a museum, or burn for lime, because they're concrete with plaster skin, peeling here and there. That's what historicism is all about: accelerated ruination. In his fascinating book <em>The Memory of the Modern</em> Matt Matsuda writes about this:<blockquote>As History accelerates, the "lieux de mémoire" are designated sites which defy time's destroyer, the places of commemoration where memory anchors the past… my subjects are… histories of accelerated memory, subjected to the dramatic rhythms of an age.</blockquote> <em></em>(Elsewhere he writes, I think, something like "cultures accelerate themselves to death".) <p><table align="left"><tr><td><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FLZM_yPO8Fw/WP8cs523voI/AAAAAAAAOpw/mxRVA5MVP208Ri4OxOMMGHpxJgNcOyZrACLcB/s1600/IMG_5103.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FLZM_yPO8Fw/WP8cs523voI/AAAAAAAAOpw/mxRVA5MVP208Ri4OxOMMGHpxJgNcOyZrACLcB/s320/IMG_5103.jpg" width="320" height="240" /></a></td></tr><tr><td><small><em> In the Coppedè </em></small></td></tr></table>Now there's no denying there's some wishfulness and some nostalgia going on here, particularly when you consider Coppedè began designing this district just before the outbreak of the First World War, and built it through that war and the buildup of Italian fascism. But it seems to me his vision has the redeeming qualities of optimism and pleasure. I look at these buildings, designed as residences in the first place, with, I'm sure, servants' quarters, and I think of Moravia's novel <em>Gli indiffernti</em>, which portrays the nature of a private and social life made too complacent by excess money and a paucity of things-to-do-with-one's-self. <p>On the other hand, as I keep saying. On the other hand, there's a relatively smaller building bearing the delightful inscription<blockquote><small>PARVA, SED APTA MIHI, SED NULLI OBNOXIA </small></blockquote>which turns out, with a little Googling, to bave been the device Ariosto inscribed on his own "last house" in Ferrara: <blockquote>Small, but suits me, and no one can </blockquote>and here it gets difficult: <blockquote>take advantage of it, [since] it's decorous, and bought with my own money.</blockquote>(The part beginning with [since] may continue around the corner of the building: I wasn't able to tell, from the street.) <p>Ariosto! Who would have thought he'd turn up here — but why not? These buildings now house foundation offices and embassies, many of the latter representing African nations. So Coppedè, in his architectural and city-planning design, links the emerging African nationalism of our time to the <em>sprezzatura</em> of the Florentine renaissance. <p>I think, given the maddening increase in world population, and its increasing urbanization, and the need to achieve a sustainable and equable economy, not to mention the need to address climate change and to eliminate warfare, the only hope for the future is a kind of socialized technocracy. If it comes, I hope there are places for Coppedès, and for tramlines too, and for the possibility of pleasurable strolls, on foot or with slow wheeled assistance. Propriety and the appropriate pace of intended decay-repair-and-replacement is what should be foremost in civic agendas.http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/04/rome-12-parva-sed-apta-mihi_25.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-8084921806510315168Mon, 24 Apr 2017 08:05:00 +00002017-04-24T01:05:22.660-07:00Rome, 11: Palaces and storerooms<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nHmgkl5FnVU/WP2xjpDGziI/AAAAAAAAOos/eJ42Cb8bWjUBYPJpJj6xf0sCT1gaMX0kwCLcB/s1600/IMG_5075.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nHmgkl5FnVU/WP2xjpDGziI/AAAAAAAAOos/eJ42Cb8bWjUBYPJpJj6xf0sCT1gaMX0kwCLcB/s400/IMG_5075.jpg" width="300" height="400" /></a></div><div align="right"><em> Via Damaso Cerquetti, Rome, April 22, 2017—</em></div> <big>I</big>&nbsp;<small>THINK IT BETTER</small> to plant gardens than build palaces, as I’ve written here before, because the ruins of gardens regrow, whereas the ruins of palaces continue to crumble away. And gardens are, as I’ve also tried to suggest, a collaboration with nature, while palaces seem to be testaments to short-term victories over her. <p>So after strolling the Roseto and the Orange-Tree Park we returned to the Forum. The previous day we’d strolled above it, on the Capitoline, where four hundred years ago the Farnese family had built a palace and a garden, the bones of which remain. It is now by and large an empty plateau atop the hill, if indeed it is a hill and not a pile of layers of ruined palaces. But it is pleasant, even on a cold and windy day, to stroll the site, and look out over the domes and rooftops of Rome, which thankfully has not allowed any high-rise building within view. Thanks to the wind blowing down from the Alps we could easily see the hills to the north, a number of miles distant. Miles are like decades and add up to centuries. <p>That afternoon we looked down on the Forum, which is much more cluttered than I recall it from a dozen years ago. I’m not sure why I think this. It seems to me short squared column-bases made of brick have been set about to show the outlines of long-vanished buildings. This afternoon we strolled the Forum itself — after the Roseto and Santa Sabina my feet. and knees protested further climbs up stairsteps; by the end of the day we’d covered seven miles on foot. And yes, on closer inspection, the Forum is more cluttered, but with helpful panels telling you in Italian and English what it is you think you’re looking at. Or, in the case of many visitors, photographing with your telephone and selfie-stick. <p>By the time we got to the Forum it was late in the afternoon, approaching that magic hour when the sun begins to accentuate the reds and the strong contrast of longer shadows accentuate the architecture, bringing the flutings of columns and the edges of reliefs into greater — well, relief. And, miracle of miracles, there are few visitors. You can take a photograph of this ruined temple or that without a single visitor in the frame. <p>After our first visit to Europe, over forty years ago, on showing slides we’t taken to a visitor (one did that in those days), he asked But are there no people in Europe? Only buildings and landscapes? And I explained that I didn’t like to photograph people, it seemed intrusive, a violation of selfhood. Now of course there’s no such compunction: everyone is photographing everybody, deliberately or <em>per caso</em>, accidentally. Now my reason for avoiding people in settings like this is that they too strongly temporize the picture: costume, hairstyle, telephone, backpack all scream <small>PRESENT</small>, when what I want to record, for my own later contemplation, is <small>CONTINUITY</small>. <p>For to me the value of the ruins of temples and palaces is their testimony to the process of time. I wrote at the outset of these letters that I was here to contemplate my feelings about religion, and to see friends and relations, and to eat and drink and walk and think. I arrived a bit of a ruin myself, thanks to the helpfulness of modern medicine, but I’m pretty well recovered from that: still, I contemplate the inevitable ruination. <p>One fellow after another has built here a palace, or an arch, or a fancy column, or a temple, dedicated largely to his own glory, and another fellow has come along and used the result as a quarry to build something bigger or better or more glorious. Some of these fellows of course were geniuses and I am glad for their work: Hadrian, Michelangelo. Some had the public good in mind as well as their own <em>gloire</em> : Trajan. The result is all the same. <p>Today we went out to Ostia Antica, the archaeological preserve preserving, archaeologically, what’s left of old Ostia, the seaport supplying Rome, whose own port was of course a river port on the Tiber. Ostia Antica is quite an amazing place. You can rent a little recorded tourguidee who discusses numbered stops, or you can ignore him. You can climb to the top tier of seats of a four-thousand seat theater, sit, and wonder what the backdrop must have been when it was there, with its statues of gods and, probably, donors. <p>You wander freely the narrow streets between residences, taverns, and storerooms. This was a working city, not a fashionable weekend retreat like Herculaneum; most of the rooms are small. You can only wonder what it may have looked like when its superstructure was still in place, for it was mostly made of wood, and all of it is long since gone. <p>You can kneel down and brush sand away from the edge of a patch of mosaic floor, laid down two thousand years ago, and expose more of it; and when you stand back up again, and walk on, you notice the ground is strewn with little cubes of white stone which must once have been parts of similar mosaic or terrazzo floors. <p>Poor Italy! Preserving, interpreting, ignoring these ruins, these and many others — Italic, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, even medieval — must be a constant headache. The archaeologists have to decide where to dig, and how far down. The government, I suppose, has to decide when to protect, when to recognize the futility of any thought of perfect control. And of course these historical records are an important tourist attraction; Christian or not, one goes to Rome to savor and contemplate all this history. <p>These days there are useful virtual reconstructions, guidebooks whose illustrations are overlays in which photographs of the present, with automobiles and backpacks, lift up to reveal artists’ imaginings of Rome As It Was, pristine and white-marbled. (Some of these concede that the statues were painted when they were new.) One day perhaps archaeology, marketing, and software engineering will be able to make virtual reality of what is now fields of fragments numbered, gathered in tubs, laid out on shelves or on fields, method and order promising the possibility of finally knowing what must have been, perhaps in order to be able to suggest what might one day be. <p>Many years ago I was asked what I wanted to accomplish before dying. The question was asked seriously, in the context of a conversation meant to ease, somehow, some of the vexing problems that seemed so overwhelming at the moment, and so inconsequential as I look back. I want to have an idea of what it all means, I answered, aware of the insolence of the ambition but incapable of denying it. I think that is what energizes all the sciences, but particularly that of archaeology. <p>I think the palaces, let alone the humble warehouses in the port, will never be rebuilt in actuality. Much of the marble was stripped to decorate the great building spree of the Italian Renaissance and the Baroque period following. Heads were broken off statues for some reason, I’ve never quite understood why, perhaps because the entire statue would have been too heavy to carry off quickly. Headless statues were often consigned to the lime-kilns to be reduced to cement. <p>My point in this rambling meditation is that palaces seem to me to be conceived and built beyond the angle of repose, the point of sustainability, far beyond. Their construction and maintenance employ many people who might otherwise have nothing to do, but at the expense of resources, including previous palaces. And I wonder if the Christian church, and perhaps governmental administration, don’t court the same folly as ultimately destroys palaces. <p>Gardens seem to me to represent the same urge, but within the angle of repose, the point of sustainability. I would rather clip hedges than chip stones.http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/04/rome-11-palaces-and-storerooms.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-1032316773710744872Sat, 22 Apr 2017 20:28:00 +00002017-04-22T13:28:49.965-07:00Rome, 10: Gardens<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xXsrzh9-M0w/WPu7rK_DPnI/AAAAAAAAOn4/0Ct9miofCGs1Wk3Rgyof8oTT3nBLremCQCLcB/s1600/IMG_5002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-xXsrzh9-M0w/WPu7rK_DPnI/AAAAAAAAOn4/0Ct9miofCGs1Wk3Rgyof8oTT3nBLremCQCLcB/s320/IMG_5002.jpg" width="320" height="240" /></a></div><div align="right"><em> Via Damaso Cerquetti, April 22, 2017—</em></div> <big>I</big>&nbsp;<small>THINK IT BETTER</small> to build gardens than palaces. Especially public gardens, or at least gardens accessible to the public. As the world’s population becomes increasingly urban, parks and gardens stand as the last link between humanity and nature, and you can’t escape the fact that nature is what governs much of human activity. <p>Gardens are controlled, as much human activity must be: but one of the pleasures of strolling in a garden is contemplating the degree to which that control is achieved, how the site chosen, the architecture of the garden, the selection of its plants, and the continuing maintenance influence its state. Not its success: it seems to me all gardens are successful, even ruined ones, on their terms; because it seems to me necessary to grant nature her terms and “values” equally to those of ours. Perhaps more. <p>Yesterday was opening day of Rome’s Roseto Comunale, the rose garden above the Circo Massimo, at its western end. We’d walked by it a few days earlier, to find the gates closed and workers busy inside: yesterday the iron gates stood open, at least to the larger garden, and there were no workers to be seen other than those still busy in the smaller one, on the north side of the Via di Valle Murcia. <p>The southern, larger garden is on a gentle hillside, not terraced, divided into large symmetrical beds, separating the roses by type: shrub, hybrid tea, David Austin, my favorite old roses pre-hybridization. Around the garden on the uphill side an arbor draws the semicircular border of this quite large garden, for climbing roses. The paths are paved under the arbor and on the stairs leading down from it into the beds; otherwise they’re gravel. <p>A day after this visit I read that the paths were deliberately laid out in a shape representing the menorah, because this hillside was once the Jewish cemetery, when Jews were confined to the Roman ghetto. I don’t remember where they moved the bodies to, or why; it was a long time ago, and a long time before the making of the Roseto, in 1950, I think. I suppose if I’d known this, and if I were Jewish, my contemplation of the garden would have taken a different course. I like it that the symbolization is subtle, there for those who want it, not at all obvious for those to whom it makes no difference. <p>Even before discovering the garden plan, and before approaching individual rosebushes — easy to do, as they’re set widely apart and still small in this early Roman spring — I was interested in the lawn the bushes are set on. “Lawn” is perhaps not quite the word. The hillside is essentially a grassy field which was apparently mown quite recently, and long grasses lie on the beds — clearly not all the mown grass; much of it must have been removed; but enough remains to show how tall the grass had been allowed to grow. <p>I suppose it’s there as a partial mulch. If I lived in this city I’d be back here every couple of weeks to see not only the evolution of the bloom but also the management of the grass. There are recessed sprinkler heads here and there, and my companion noticed some mildew already present here and there: but this north-facing, very open site is exposed to wind, and I imagine discreet sprinkling works well, the water quickly evaporating from the leaves. <p>The roses! Already most of the bushes are in bloom; you can smell this garden a city block away, downwind. (Not that there really are city blocks in this part of town.) I didn’t make any noes, and I’m not about to tell you what’s included specifically: but there are hundreds of varieties here, set out , as grows apparent only slowly, in straight lines within the curve-boundaried beds. <p>As you can tell I like roses but not enough to memorize names and pedigrees — though the history of rose culture is an interesting one, and intersects, of course, with most other branches of human history. I don’t even carry in my mind the names of the roses Lindsey has planted on Eastside Road: there must be over thirty of them by now. Like her, I tend to favor the scented roses, and for years roses were bred not for scent but for showiness, sacrificing, it seems to me, their essential quality in favor of brash color, size, and length of bloom. There’s a metaphor here; I needn’t belabor it. <p>Not far from the Roseto, still on the Aventine hill, stands the church (or is it a basilica? I’m always confused about this) of Santa Sabina, a fine, austere, serious building just overhauled, and successfully so, for last year’s Catholic Jubilee Year. And next to it is the Giardino degli Aranci, as the Romans call their Parco Savello — the garden of the orange trees. Like the Roseto it’s a fine place to get away from the hum of the city: a flat half-acre, more or less, very symmetrical, of clipped weeds, I would say, and bitter-orange trees, with high walls on three sides and a marvelous viewing platform on the north. <p>A folding chair, a guitar-stand, and an amplifier and loudspeaker stood near the center of the park when we visited. Mercifully they were unattended. I think music, especially amplified music, is out of place in these gardens, unless a concert has specifically been planned. I prefer the sounds of the breeze in the trees and the occasional bird, though the gulls and magpies populating these gardens rarely sing, and that’s good too, you can hardly call their vocalisms song. <p>Many years ago I was present at the premiere of Douglas Leedy’s Exhibition Music, written specifically to be performed in a garden, on the occasion f the twentieth anniversary, I think it was, of the founding of the United Nations. Instrumentalists and singers were stationed at various places within a fairly extensive garden looking out over San Francisco Bay toward the site of the Charter’s signing. They played and sang quietly, each for himself, not coordinated in any but the most basic way, each expressing an individual musical comment within a context of mutual harmony. Guests strolled the garden, discovering this detail or that, lingering at moments of their own pleasure or interest, in a musical and horticultural metaphor of international cooperation. <p>That’s the kind of music I’d like in my garden, but only on occasion. <p>The formal symmetry of this Orange-Tree Garden, and the scent of the orange blossoms, inescapably brought the orange groves in the Andalucian mezquitas, but this park owes its origin, apparently, to St. Boniface — though he is said to have brought the original tree, true enough, from Spain; the first orange tree to grow in Rome. And the tree was of course reputedly miraculous and never-dying; and in truth when work was done recently a 15th-century coin (or was it 14th?) was found in its roots. That doesn’t prove anything, of course, for the right price I could buy an imperial Roman coin to plant with the next fruit tree I plant at home, and maybe I should, just to confound someone decades hence, as I’ve already buried a valuable hand-forged Sardinian knife from Pattadà in concrete poured into a fencepost hole, though that was not intentional.http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/04/rome-10-gardens.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-7670546660467234953Thu, 20 Apr 2017 20:59:00 +00002017-04-20T13:59:43.429-07:00Rome, 9: The Colosseum<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CuLTgoTwttI/WPkhIMsVFQI/AAAAAAAAOnA/-qFvunxVWYwm9a3k_f-fWa09S-SMsAP-wCLcB/s1600/IMG_9220.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CuLTgoTwttI/WPkhIMsVFQI/AAAAAAAAOnA/-qFvunxVWYwm9a3k_f-fWa09S-SMsAP-wCLcB/s320/IMG_9220.jpg" width="320" height="240" /></a><div align="right"><em> Via Damaso Cerquetti, April 20, 2017——</em></div> <big>I</big>&nbsp;<small>AM HAPPY</small> to report that the Colosseum is much changed. Well, not the building itself, of course, though every time I see it I think more brickwork and reinforcing new concrete has been added. Nor do I recall those huge blocks of white stone stacked up on what you might call its rim, on the north side, which look as if they’d be easily dislodged in a serious earthquake. <p>What’s changed, beyond the thorough cleaning it’s been given — it gleams as white as Cestius’s Pyramid now, as white as, well, a toilet — what’s changed is the whole experience of visiting it. I guess I was last there ten years or so ago. In those days, as I recall, you wandered around in the Forum and the Colosseum freely, without paying; you shared the Forum with a few other tourists and some archaeology and history buffs, but it wasn’t terribly crowded. But of course that was in November, I think, or maybe January. <p>Now it’s all being marketed, and successfully, and I must say rather well. Although there are a few people offering you tours, the phony gladiators who used to strut around waiting to be photographed with your kids or wife in funny poses are all gone. A couple of military vehicles are parked on the road leading downhill from the Piazza del Colosseo, and you are screened (and so are your bags, and the contents of your pockets) on entering, there’s not a lot of obvious security presence. <p> But there are nice new bookstores, and an elevator, and fairly extensive panels in Italian and English describing this thing and that. I had the feeling the place is less romantic, less a ruin even, and more an archaeological and historical artifact. We were there early in the day, a little bast opening time (8:30), and had bought tickets online: I showed the e-mailed receipt on my iPhone, and we were whisked through security scan and on our way. <p>It was biting cold. Windy, too. The wind’s been blowing down from the Alps these last couple of days, bringing dust and headaches. We toughed it out, though, strolling the available levels, never making a complete circuit, stopping in a bookstore to warm ourselves up. <p>At one point on the second level, I think, there’s a fine installation of “Images of the Colosseum” — perhaps a changing exhibit, I don’t know, certainly one well worth seeing, even studying. There are early depictions on coins, architectural analyses from the Renaissance, romantic paintings and drawings from the 18th and 19th centuries, even 20th-century drawings and photographs offering revisions of the building. One envisions a huge cubical hotel rising from within the Colosseum — a project not likely to be achieved, but who knows, these days. <p>There is an amazing three-dimensional model of the Colosseum, scaled at 1:60, made of wood, bone, and lead, several hundred years ago, made not ass it was now, or at the time the model was made, but as it must have been when it was new in 833 — excuse me: that’s the Roman calendar: 80 CE we call it. (Now: I’m still more familiar with 80 A.D.) The detail on this scale model is unbelievable; it makes one ache to see a full restoration of the building. <p>That would be impossible, of course. Virtually all the travertine and marble once sheathing the building are long gone, stripped not only for the stone but also for the bronze fittings that held the veneer to the (let’s face it) rather crude Roman concrete and tufa blocks making up the thing. The Colosseum is made of concrete and sand, I read somewhere: brick and rubble, too. It took nearly ten years to build, and much of the material must have come from Nero’s vast palace which had overlooked the lake he’d had built on the site, formerly an unhealthy swampy area infested, he must have felt, with the wretched hovels and shops of commoners. <p>Leafing through the Internet I happened on a fascinating description of the behind-the-scenes operations of the Colosseum in <em><a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/secrets-of-the-colosseum-75827047/">Smithsonian Magazine</a></em> , and looking down into the exposed sub-floor archaeological digs it was fairly easy to imagine the operation of elevators, cages, and ramps necessary to the elaborate productions for which this monumental thing was built. It’s often been said the purpose was civic (therefore national) pride, reinforcement of militaristic and stoic values, celebration of the new lands continually being brought under Roman subjugation. Wild animals were brought from North Africa, Dacia, and elsewhere. <p>Criminals were made to fight one another to the death, as is well known, but there were lapses in the general cruelty. One emperor, having caught a jeweler passing off inferior stuff to his wife, sentenced him to one of these hunts: but when the caged animal was released in front of the quivering cheat, instead of a lion or leopard he was confronted with an angry chicken. The crowds laughed; the emperor let the poor fellow off, with a warning. <p>We spent a couple of hours in the Colosseum, then strolled over to the Forum. Surprise: the line at the entrance was a good fifty yards long and not moving at all. I remembered another entrance, down the Via di San Gregorio, that leads up into the Palatine hill, and there was no line at all. We spent another couple of hours there, strolling, looking down on the Colosseum and the Forum, now quite full of tourists with their guidebooks and acoustical guides and even, I think, iPhone apps explaining things. <p>We were content to read the many panels, always in both Italian and English, and to stumble on the Farnese gardens, the roses coming into full bloom and scenting the air, and to sit on benches in the sun and ouot of the biting wind. It’s a melancholy business, of course, wandering among these testaments to impermanence, but the resurgence of weeds, and the beauty of gardens and pines, helps to put everything in perspective. <p>On the way down the Via de San Gregorio toward the Circus Maximus — and in truth toward a refreshing spritz at a sidewalk table — fourteen-year-old was accosted by a con man from Africa. I’m black, you’re white, he said, here’s a gift, and gave him some sort of bracelet. I was a little ahead of them and didn’t realize what was going on for a minute. He turned out to want ten euros for it, of course. I told the boy to leave it on a handy wall, knowing the guy was watching. Oh, you don’t want it, he said, Not good. We walked on, ignoring him. I hope he’s sentenced to a chicken.http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/04/rome-9-colosseum.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-9158535512255135353Wed, 19 Apr 2017 16:26:00 +00002017-04-19T09:26:30.646-07:00Rome, 8: Cleaning lady<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-i1bpcNNouTM/WPePfMh1YAI/AAAAAAAAOmk/URsWwCo4Jrk8gMMLOanoGcXxpWl30kSUwCLcB/s1600/IMG_4898.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-i1bpcNNouTM/WPePfMh1YAI/AAAAAAAAOmk/URsWwCo4Jrk8gMMLOanoGcXxpWl30kSUwCLcB/s400/IMG_4898.jpg" width="300" height="400" /></a></div><div align="right"><em> Via Damaso Cerquetti, April 19, 2017—</em></div> <big>T</big><small>HE CLEANING LADY</small> arrived today. I thought she looked familiar somehow: about five foot four, sturdy, dark straight bobbed hair, a pleasant smile. She rang the doorbell at two o’clock, as we’d expected, stepped in introducing herself (Maria), stepped to the coat closet and extricated a house-dress smock I hadn’t noticed before, and set to. <p>I took a nap, so am not absolutely sure what she did. I slept on the living room couch until Lindsey woke me, then moved to our bedroom. For the first time in days the steel roll-down shutter was fully open, ditto the two leaves of the window. Sun streamed into the room; the air was fresh. <p>Of course we’d prepared for her. My backpack, which has lain open at the foot of the bed on my side, against the wall, was in the closet; my slippers ditto; my travel painting and photo and bandana on my pillow. I lay down on the bed to finish my map and was pleased to find the spot where I lie was warm. I thought for a moment that there must be an electric blanket, but I knew that wasn’t the case — we sleep on a sheet and under a duvet, like most Europeans these days. (Or nights, I suppose I should write.) It was simply that the sun had warmed that spot on the bed. Delightful. <p>After a bit I was fully awake and moved back into the liviing room, where she was finishing up. In two hours she had cleaned both bathrooms, the kitchen, mopped and swept the floors, and polished all the windows. She was still smiling. <p>We had a little conversation, in the course of which I learned that our palazzo (apartment building) is fifty or sixty years old; the ones across the street are new and have replaced a block of palazzi similar to ours; the apartments within our building differ considerably from one another; ours was substantially remodelled when the current owners moved in (interior walls done away with, new wood floor, new built-ins in the bedroom, new kitchen appliances); she cleans many of the apartments in this building. <p>She asked politely where we were from and we told her and I reciprocated. Sono da Romania, she said, I’m from Romania, not from Bucharest, from the mountains, and I saw why she looked familiar, she looked like so many of the women I’d seen in Brasov and Cluj and thereabouts when I was in Romania nearly thirty-five years ago. I told her I’d traveled in her country and that I thought it was very beautiful. Yes, she said, Italy is beautiful, but Romania is more beautiful, especially the mountains. I don’t like antiquities, she said, the Pantheon, the Colisseum. The Vatican is beautiful of course, it is the home of the Pope, but the rest, you see it once, you don’t have to see it again. But the mountains, and the forests… <p>I told her I’d always wanted to walk in her mountains and forests. You should, she said, the people will like you to come. Are there still bears and wolves, I wondered. Oh yes, more than ever, we used to kill them but we don’t do that any more so there are more and more of them. Horses, sheep, many sheep… she smiled, partly I think at her immodesty in sharing her nostalgia, partly in simple friendliness. <p>After she left I went down with fourteen-year-old to do some shopping and found another reason she’d looked familiar: she’s the concierge. As I think I’ve said before, this palazzo, like most, has a little office in the lobby for a concierge. There’s an outer glass door, a big one, which is always locked; there’s an inner one which is never locked; then you come to the lobby, and on your left is the concierge’s office. Perhaps she lives here: I don’t know. <p>I’ve only met one other Italian residential concierge, in Verona. He too was an immigrant, but from Nepal I think, or some such south central Asian country. Maria is Romanian, descended from the Dacians who were conquered by Emperor Trajan about 100 CE. Things were not so good when I was in Romania, a few years before the end of the Ceaucescu regime; poverty was extreme, and governmental spying and suppression quite extreme. <p>I suppose it’s better now. I met a Romanian a few years ago in Sicily; he walked into an apparently empty bar in which I was sitting, waiting while Lindsey did the laundry, and mistook me for the bartender, and ordered a coffee. He was very apologetic when I explained I was just resting while the bartender was off doing whatever he was doing, and we fell into a conversation. It’s terribly hard in Romania now, he said, that’s why I’m here in Sicily, looking for work, there’s no work in Romania. But it is so beautiful there…http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/04/8-cleaning-lady.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-4810132233295711551Wed, 19 Apr 2017 07:16:00 +00002017-04-19T00:36:54.796-07:00Rome, 7: Man in the street<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-iMmPhr0596o/WPcOv2lfF_I/AAAAAAAAOmU/hBAYFwSt4IckqIhE5mGA1vgSwfnE0ixLQCLcB/s1600/IMG_4959.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-iMmPhr0596o/WPcOv2lfF_I/AAAAAAAAOmU/hBAYFwSt4IckqIhE5mGA1vgSwfnE0ixLQCLcB/s1600/IMG_4959.jpg" /></a></div><div align="right"><em>Via Damaso Cerquetti, Rome, April 19—</em></div><big>O</big><small>STENSIBLY THE PURPOSE</small> of this trip is to introduce fourteen-year-old to Rome, its history and its wonders, but in fact he has primarily been exposed to the important skill of <em>flåner</em>, that elegant French word we use when we don’t want to admit to loafing. We seem to have intentions: getting a special loaf of bread, finding more English peas at the greengrocer. But we wind up strolling through the Non-Catholic Cemetery, or paying hommage once again to Fatamorgana. <p>The other day in front of the Spanish Steps — I wonder if fourteen-year-old has any visual memory of the place, overcrowded as usual with tourists — we were approached by a well-dressed man, in his sixties I would say, who wondered if he could be any help to us. Oh no, I said, I’m just looking for an interesting walking route to the Governo Vecchio. (We were planning to stop at the excellent Caffè Novecento.) <p>Oh, simple enough, he said in very good English with only a slight accent, but you can’t go straight there, you follow this street to the end, then turn to the left and look for it. <p>He was relatively tall for a Roman his age and quite slender.. I thought he was from the north. But you’re not a Roman, are you, I asked, pretending his knowledge of the streets suggested he was. No, he said, I’m from the Veneto; I work in glass, plates and that sort of thing. You’re from the States? My product is in Magnin, Nordstrom… <p>We confirmed that we were Californians, and, on his asking, that we were staying in Monteverde, near the Piazzale Dunant. Oh then you must try a restaurant there, he said, very local, the tourists don’t know about it, a very Roman place called C’Era Una Volta. We thanked him and went on our way, straight down the long street toward the Tiber, then left and eventually to the Caffè. <p>After we’d left him, though, and gone on a few meters, I turned to see what he might be doing. Standing on the corner, smiling gently, waiting for another conversation I suppose. Human street furniture. In Sicily a few years ago we found there are still those modest functionaries ready to carry a bag, or advise directions, or (most importantly) watch your parked car, for a coin or two. Of course we hadn’t offered our Spanish Steps guide anything, nor, I think, did he expect us to; he was simply a retired salesman enjoying the sun and looking for the kind of human contact that his career had offered him. <p>Yesterday on the Ponte Sisto we walked past a four-man band: standup bass, drummer, clarinet, vocalist. They were playing 1930s jazz, and they were pretty good. They were from Sabbioneta, the bass player said with a smile, as he plucked away, tonic and dominant. I dropped a euro in the cap lying on the pavement; there weren’t many others in it. At the other end of the bridge a more traditional musician, an old man with his accordion playing some Italian folksong, probably a commercial one from the 19th century, not Neapolitan I’m pretty sure. Another euro. <p>I’m struck by the general lack of panhandling and homelessness in the quarters we inhabit. Maybe it’s not yet warm enough; maybe the government has cracked down; I don’t know. There is a degree of incivility — youngsters will not give up seats on the trams and buses, for example; only a rare visitor will do that. The other day it was a couple of fortyish Bangadeshi men on the crowded train up to Pisa: we’d stood an hour on the train, glaring at youngsters sprawling in the seats, playing cards, listening to their music, applying make-up, studiously avoicing looking up at us. The Bangladesh were down at the other end of the car and had apparently been trying to catch our eye; finally we noticed; they smiled and stood and beckoned to us to come sit down. <p>Other Bangladeshi sell things: garlic, in the street markets, for example. I think the vendors at more or less permanent stalls on the sidewalk, selling cheap underwear, electrical accessories, shoes and socks, umbrellas and the like — I think they are more or less permanent residents. No doubt other more peripatetic street vendors — of sunglasses when it’s sunny, umbrellas when it rains (and how are they so quickly supplied the correct item?) — are refugees trying to make a few bucks to feed themselves and perhaps family back home. (I get this insight from a remarkable novel I read last month, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s <em>La Superba</em>, about African emigrants to Genoa.) <p>There’s an African refugee who stands at the gate to the supermarket across the street, politely waiting. Sometimes I drop a fifty-cent piece into his cap; mostly I don’t. He unfailingly smiles at me. I’ve noticed other people, presumably locals, follow exactly the same procedure. The other day we were at the famouos bakery Bonci to buy an Easter cake: it was crowded, and I waited outside. I struck up a conversation with a refugee who was from Senegal. He’d arrived in Lampedusa five years ago, he said, and had a wife and two kids. It was very difficult, he said. <p>When I finally got inside I bought a jar of white beans for him, but when we left the shop he was nowhere to be seen. I don’t know if I’d queered his operation by opening a conversation with him, whether he’d taken a break for lunch, whether he’d been driven away — I’ll never know. <p>Yesterday we stepped into the cloister at San Giovanni Battista dei Genovesi, on via Anicia in Trastevere. I wasn’t sure about it; there’s only an ordinary wooden door in the wall next to a brass plate of push-buttons like you see on every apartment building. You must ring for the porter, a DHL delivery man said — he happened to be there at the same time. The porter appeared, a very small man, rather serious, not particularly well dressed but not shabby. <p>May we see the cloister, I asked, and he silently waved us through the small doorway into one of the most tranquil spots we’ve found, a complete surprise. A small, square cloister surrounded by two-storey walls, with graceful, slender double columns; the garden rather lush and green, with palms — they say the first palm planted in Rome was planted here — and flowering trees, and a wellhead at the center which we were unfortunately not allowed to visit, as the garden was chained off, and could be admired only from the colonnades. <p>Nor were we allowed to photograph. The moment my companion lifted her iPhone the little man appeared: <i>No foto.</i> I don’t know where he’d been lurking. He appeared as if by magic a couple of times later; we were taking our time here, and he wanted to be sure we weren’t sneaking photos, I think. (The photo on this page is from Wikipedia.) I asked about the wellhead as we left, and slipped a euro into his palm: he had made no gesture to ask for it, but was quick to understand my intention. http://cshere.blogspot.com/2017/04/rome-7-man-in-street.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Charles Shere)0